Geometry & Topology, Vol. 7 (2003) Paper no. 14, pages 487--510.

Precompactness of solutions to the Ricci flow in the absence of injectivity radius estimates

David Glickenstein


Abstract. Consider a sequence of pointed n-dimensional complete Riemannian manifolds {(M_i,g_i(t), O_i)} such that t in [0,T] are solutions to the Ricci flow and g_i(t) have uniformly bounded curvatures and derivatives of curvatures. Richard Hamilton showed that if the initial injectivity radii are uniformly bounded below then there is a subsequence which converges to an n-dimensional solution to the Ricci flow. We prove a generalization of this theorem where the initial metrics may collapse. Without injectivity radius bounds we must allow for convergence in the Gromov-Hausdorff sense to a space which is not a manifold but only a metric space. We then look at the local geometry of the limit to understand how it relates to the Ricci flow.

Keywords. Ricci flow, Gromov-Hausdorff convergence

AMS subject classification. Primary: 53C44. Secondary: 53C21.

DOI: 10.2140/gt.2003.7.487

E-print: arXiv:math.DG/0211191

Submitted to GT on 9 December 2002. Paper accepted 10 July 2003. Paper published 29 July 2003.

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David Glickenstein
Department of Mathematics, University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0112, USA
Email: glicken@math.ucsd.edu

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