English

Existence of a stable shrinker for the corotational harmonic map heat flow in higher space dimensions

Analysis of PDEs 2026-07-29 v1

Abstract

We study singularity formation for the heat flow of harmonic maps from Rd\R^d into Sd\mathbb{S}^d in supercritical dimensions d{3,4,5,6}d \in \{3,4,5,6\}. It is well known that in each of these dimensions there exist infinitely many self-similar solutions that provide examples of loss of regularity in finite time. In this paper, we extend the results of \cite{BieDon18}, \cite{BieDonSch17} for d=3d=3 to higher space dimensions d{4,5,6}d \in \{4,5,6\} and prove the existence of a monotonically increasing self-similar profile f0f_0, which is asymptotically stable under small corotational perturbations. To construct the solution and resolve the spectral problem, we use rigorous computer assistance. As a byproduct of our stability analysis, we also obtain finite-codimension stability of arbitrary self-similar profiles within the corotational class.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.27072,
  title  = {Existence of a stable shrinker for the corotational harmonic map heat flow in higher space dimensions},
  author = {Johannes Angerer and Sarah Kistner and Birgit Schörkhuber},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.27072},
  year   = {2026}
}