In the mathematical fields of differential geometry and geometric analysis, the Ricci flow ( , ), sometimes also referred to as Hamilton's Ricci flow, is a certain partial differential equation for a Riemannian metric. It is often said to be analogous to the diffusion of heat and the heat equation, due to formal similarities in the mathematical structure of the equation. However, it is nonlinear and exhibits many phenomena not present in the study of the heat equation.
The Ricci flow, so named for the presence of the Ricci tensor in its definition, was introduced by Richard Hamilton, who used it through the 1980s to prove striking new results in Riemannian geometry. Later extensions of Hamilton's methods by various authors resulted in new applications to geometry, including the resolution of the differentiable sphere conjecture by Simon Brendle and Richard Schoen.
Following Shing-Tung Yau's suggestion that the singularities of solutions of the Ricci flow could identify the topological data predicted by William Thurston's geometrization conjecture, Hamilton produced a number of results in the 1990s which were directed towards the conjecture's resolution. In 2002 and 2003, Grigori Perelman presented a number of fundamental new results about the Ricci flow, including a novel variant of some technical aspects of Hamilton's program. Perelman's work is now widely regarded as forming the proof of the Thurston conjecture and the Poincaré conjecture, regarded as a special case of the former. It should be emphasized that the Poincare conjecture has been a well-known open problem in the field of geometric topology since 1904. These results by Hamilton and Perelman are considered as a milestone in the fields of geometry and topology.
Mathematical definition
On a smooth manifold , a smooth Riemannian metric automatically determines the Ricci tensor . For each element of , by definition is a positive-definite inner product on the tangent space at . If given a one-parameter family of Riemannian metrics , one may then consider the derivative , which then assigns to each particular value of and a symmetric bilinear form on . Since the Ricci tensor of a Riemannian metric also assigns to each a symmetric bilinear form on , the following definition is meaningful. Given a smooth manifold and an open real interval , a Ricci flow assigns, to each in the interval , a Riemannian metric on such that . The Ricci tensor is often thought of as an average value of the sectional curvatures, or as an algebraic trace of the Riemann curvature tensor. However, for the analysis of existence and uniqueness of Ricci flows, it is extremely significant that the Ricci tensor can be defined, in local coordinates, by a formula involving the first and second derivatives of the metric tensor. This makes the Ricci flow into a geometrically-defined partial differential equation. The analysis of the ellipticity of the local coordinate formula provides the foundation for the existence of Ricci flows; see the following section for the corresponding result.
Let be a nonzero number. Given a Ricci flow on an interval , consider for between and . Then . So, with this very trivial change of parameters, the number −2 appearing in the definition of the Ricci flow could be replaced by any other nonzero number. For this reason, the use of −2 can be regarded as an arbitrary convention, albeit one which essentially every paper and exposition on Ricci flow follows. The only significant difference is that if −2 were replaced by a positive number, then the existence theorem discussed in the following section would become a theorem which produces a Ricci flow that moves backwards (rather than forwards) in parameter values from initial data.
The parameter is usually called , although this is only as part of standard informal terminology in the mathematical field of partial differential equations. It is not physically meaningful terminology. In fact, in the standard quantum field theoretic interpretation of the Ricci flow in terms of the renormalization group, the parameter corresponds to length or energy, rather than time.
Normalized Ricci flow
Suppose that is a compact smooth manifold, and let be a Ricci flow for in the interval . Define so that each of the Riemannian metrics has volume 1; this is possible since is compact. (More generally, it would be possible if each Riemannian metric had finite volume.) Then define to be the antiderivative of which vanishes at . Since is positive-valued, is a bijection onto its image . Now the Riemannian metrics , defined for parameters , satisfy