No. 2025.11
Convergence of gradient flows on knotted curves
E. Döhrer and N. Freches
Subject: Sobolev gradient flow, tangent point energy, Lojasiewicz-Simon gradient inequality, full convergence
Abstract
We prove full convergence of gradient-flows of the arc-length restricted tangent point energies in the Hilbert-case towards critical points. This is done through a Łojasiewicz-Simon gradient inequality for these energies. In order to do so, we prove, that the tangent-point energies are anlytic on the manifold of immersed embeddings and that their Hessian is Fredholm with index zero on the manifold of arc-length parametrized curves. As a by-product, we also show that the metric on the manifold of embedded immersed curves, defined by the first author, is analytic.