On the Transport of Currents

Abstract

In this work, we consider some evolutionary models for k-currents in \(\mathbb {R}^d\). We study a transport-type equation which can be seen as a generalisation of the transport/continuity equation and can be used to model the movement of singular structures in a medium, such as vortex points/lines/sheets in fluids or dislocation loops in crystals. We provide a detailed overview of recent results on this equation obtained mostly in (Bonicatto et al. Transport of currents and geometric Rademacher-type theorems. arXiv:2207.03922, 2022; Bonicatto et al. Existence and uniqueness for the transport of currents by Lipschitz vector fields. arXiv:2303.03218, 2023). We work within the setting of integral (sometimes merely normal) k-currents, covering in particular existence and uniqueness of solutions, structure theorems, rectifiability, and a number of Rademacher-type differentiability results. These differentiability results are sharp and can be formulated in terms of a novel condition we called “Negligible Criticality condition” (NC), which turns out to be related also to Sard’s Theorem. We finally provide a new stability result for integral currents satisfying (NC) in a uniform way.