CMS Coxeter-James Lecture / Conférence Coxeter-James de la SMC


JINGYI CHEN, The University of British Columbia
Recent developments in mean curvature flow of higher codimension

Mean curvature flow is the gradient flow of the volume functional of submanifolds which are smoothly immersed in a higher dimensional manifold. Along the flow, volume of the submanifold is decreasing. The flow satisfies a parabolic system of nonlinear partial differential equations. In this talk, we shall discuss some recent progress in mean curvature flow of submanifolds of codimension at least two (the non-hypersurface case). In particular, motivated by geometric and topological applications, we shall discuss the motion of real 2-dimensional symplectic surfaces in a Kahler-Einstein surface (complex 2-dimensional) and n-dimensional Lagrangian submanifolds in a Calabi-Yau manifold of complex dimension n.