Global weak solutions for the inverse mean curvature flow in the Heisenberg group

TL;DR

This paper establishes the existence of global weak solutions to the inverse mean curvature flow in the Heisenberg group, extending the theory to both Riemannian and sub-Riemannian geometries using a weak formulation approach.

Contribution

It introduces a framework for weak solutions of IMCF in the Heisenberg group, covering both Riemannian and sub-Riemannian cases, and connects IMCF with p-harmonic functions.

Findings

Existence of global weak IMCF solutions in Heisenberg group.

Solutions are level sets of Lipschitz functions with logarithmic growth.

Framework unifies Riemannian and sub-Riemannian geometries for IMCF.

Abstract

We consider the inverse mean curvature flow (IMCF) in the Heisenberg group $(\He^n, d_\varepsilon)$, where $d_\varepsilon$ is distance associated to either $| \cdot |_\varepsilon$, $\varepsilon>0$, the natural family of left-invariant Riemannian metrics, or with their sub-Riemannian counterparts for $\varepsilon=0$. For $\Omega \subseteq \He^n$ an open set with smooth boundary $\Sigma_0=\partial \Omega$ satisfying a uniform exterior gauge-ball condition and bounded complement we show existence of a global weak IMCF of generalized hypersurfaces $\{\Sigma^\varepsilon_s\}_{s \geq 0} \subseteq \mathbb{H}^n$ which are level sets of a proper globally Lipschitz function with logarithmic growth at infinity. Here, both in the Riemannian and in the sub-Riemannian setting, we adopt the weak formulation introduced by Huisken and Ilmanen in \cite{HuiskenIlmanen}, following the approach in \cite{Moser} due to Moser and based on the the link between IMCF and $p$-harmonic functions.