Motion of islands of elastic thin films in the dewetting regime

Abstract This paper addresses a two-dimensional sharp interface variational model for solid-state dewetting of thin films with surface energies, introduced by Wang, Jiang, Bao, and Srolovitz in Jiang et al. (Scr Mater 115:123–127, 2016). Using the $$H^{-1}$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:msup> <mml:mi>H</mml:mi> <mml:mrow> <mml:mo>-</mml:mo> <mml:mn>1</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:msup> </mml:math> -gradient flow structure of the evolution law, short-time existence for a surface diffusion evolution equation with curvature regularization is established in the context of epitaxially strained two-dimensional films. The main novelty, as compared to the study of the wetting regime, is the presence of moving contact lines.