On the stability of type II blowup for the 1-corotational energy-supercritical harmonic heat flow

Abstract

We consider the energy supercritical harmonic heat flow from $\mathbb{R}^d$ into the $d$-sphere $\mathbb{S}^d$ with $d \geq 7$. Under an additional assumption of 1-corotational symmetry, the problem reduces to the one dimensional semilinear heat equation $$\partial_t u = \partial^2_r u + \frac{(d-1)}{r}\partial_r u - \frac{(d-1)}{2r^2}\sin(2u).$$ We construct for this equation a family of $\mathcal{C}^{\infty}$ solutions which blow up in finite time via concentration of the universal profile $$u(r,t) \sim Q\left(\frac{r}{\lambda(t)}\right),$$ where $Q$ is the stationary solution of the equation and the speed is given by the quantized rates $$\lambda(t) \sim c_u(T-t)^\frac{\ell}{\gamma}, \quad \ell \in \mathbb{N}^*, \;\; 2\ell > \gamma = \gamma(d) \in (1,2].$$ The construction relies on two arguments: the reduction of the problem to a finite-dimensional one thanks to a robust universal energy method and modulation techniques developed by Merle, Rapha\"el and Rodnianski [Camb. Jour. Math, 3(4):439-617, 2015] for the energy supercritical nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation and by Rapha\"el and Schweyer [Anal. PDE, 7(8):1713-1805, 2014] for the energy critical harmonic heat flow, then we proceed by contradiction to solve the finite-dimensional problem and conclude using the Brouwer fixed point theorem. Moreover, our constructed solutions are in fact $(\ell - 1)$ codimension stable under perturbations of the initial data. As a consequence, the case $\ell = 1$ corresponds to a stable type II blowup regime.