Rigidity of generic singularities of mean curvature flow

Tobias Holck Colding, Tom Ilmanen, William P. Minicozzi II

Published 2013-04-23, updated 2015-02-12Version 2

Shrinkers are special solutions of mean curvature flow (MCF) that evolve by rescaling and model the singularities. While there are infinitely many in each dimension, [CM1] showed that the only generic are round cylinders $\SS^k\times \RR^{n-k}$. We prove here that round cylinders are rigid in a very strong sense. Namely, any other shrinker that is sufficiently close to one of them on a large, but compact, set must itself be a round cylinder. To our knowledge, this is the first general rigidity theorem for singularities of a nonlinear geometric flow. We expect that the techniques and ideas developed here have applications to other flows. Our results hold in all dimensions and do not require any a priori smoothness.