Discrete-to-continuum crystalline curvature flows

Abstract: We consider here a fully discrete variant of the implicit variational scheme for mean curvature flow [AlmTayWan,LucStu], in a setting where the flow is governed by a crystalline surface tension defined by the limit of pairwise interactions energy on the discrete grid. The algorithm is based on a new discrete distance from the evolving sets, which prevents the occurrence of the spatial drift and pinning phenomena identified in [MisiatsYip16,BraGelNov] in a similar discrete framework. We provide the first rigorous convergence result holding in any dimension, for any initial set and for a large class of purely crystalline anisotropies, in which the spatial discretization mesh can be of the same order or coarser than the time step.