Theory and numerics for Chen's flow of curves

Abstract

In this article we study Chen's flow of curves from theoretical and numerical perspectives. We investigate two settings: that of closed immersed ω-circles, and immersed lines satisfying a cocompactness condition. In each of the settings our goal is to find geometric conditions that allow us to understand the global behaviour of the flow: for the cocompact case, the condition is straightforward and the argument is largely standard. For the closed case however, the argument is quite complex. The flow shrinks every initial curve to a point if it does not become singular beforehand, and we must identify a condition to ensure this behaviour as well as identify the point in order to perform the requisite rescaling. We are able to successfully conduct a full analysis of the rescaling under a curvature condition. The analysis resembles the case of the mean curvature flow more than other fourth-order curvature flow such as the elastic flow or the curve diffusion flow, despite the lack of maximum and comparison principles. Our work is informed by a numerical study of the flow, and we include a section that explains the algorithms used.