Mean Curvature Flow Solitons in the Presence of Conformal Vector Fields

Abstract

In this paper we introduce and study a notion of mean curvature flow soliton in Riemannian ambient spaces general enough to encompass target spaces of constant sectional curvature, Riemannian products or, in increasing generality, warped product spaces. As expected, our definition is motivated by the self-similarity of certain special solutions of the mean curvature flow with respect to the flow generated by a distinguished vector field on the target manifold. Our approach allows us to identify some natural geometric quantities that satisfy elliptic equations or differential inequalities in a simple and manageable form for which the machinery of weak maximum principles is valid. The latter is one of the main tools we apply to derive several new characterizations and rigidity results for mean curvature flow solitons that extend to our much more general setting known properties, for instance, in Euclidean space.