Gradient flows with wiggly potential: a variational approach to the dynamics
Free energies with many small wiggles, arising from small scale micro-structural changes, appear often in phase transformations, protein folding and friction problems. In this paper we investigate gradient flows with energies E_epsilon given by the superposition of a convex functional and fast small
oscillations. We apply the time-discrete minimising movement scheme to capture the effect of the local minimizers ofE_epsilon in the limit equation as epsilon tends to zero.