Fractional Sobolev metrics on spaces of immersions

We prove that the geodesic equations of all Sobolev metrics of fractional order one and higher on spaces of diffeomorphisms and, more generally, immersions are locally well posed. This result builds on the recently established real analytic dependence of fractional Laplacians on the underlying Riemannian metric. It extends several previous results and applies to a wide range of variational partial differential equations, including the well-known Euler–Arnold equations on diffeomorphism groups as well as the geodesic equations on spaces of manifold-valued curves and surfaces.