Classification of ancient ovals in higher dimensional mean curvature flow

Abstract: We study compact non-selfsimilar ancient noncollapsed solutions to the mean curvature flow in $\mathbb{R}^{n+1}$, called ancient ovals. Our main result is the classification of $k$-ovals: any $k$-oval (characterized by having cylindrical blow down $\mathbb{R}^k\times S^{n-k}$ and the quadratic bending asymptotics) belongs, up to space-time rigid motions and parabolic dilations, to the family of ancient ovals constructed by Haslhofer and the second author. Assuming the nonexistence of exotic ovals (recently proved by Bamler-Lai), this yields a classification of all ancient ovals and identifies the moduli space, modulo symmetries, with an open $(k-1)$-simplex modulo the symmetry of simplex. Although these conclusions are contained in the recent breakthrough of Bamler-Lai classifying all ancient asymptotically cylindrical flows and resolving the mean convex neighborhood conjecture, we give an alternative argument for the independently obtained classification of $k$-ovals in arbitrary dimensions based on a different spectral parametrization.