Monday, 3 July 2006

dg.differential geometry - Does Ricci flow with surgery come from sections of a smooth Riemannian manifold?

More precisely, is Ricci flow with surgery on a 3-dimensional Riemannian manifold M given by the "constant-time" sections of some canonical smooth 4-dimensional Riemannian manifold?



There would be a discrete set of times corresponding to the surgeries, but the 4-dimensional manifold might still be smooth at these points even though its sections would have singularities. The existence of such a 4-manifold is well known if there are no singularities: the problem is whether one can still construct it in the presence of singularities.



Background: Ricci flow on M in general has finite time singularities. These are usually dealt with by a rather complicated procedure, where one stops the flow just before the singularities, then carefully cuts up M into smaller pieces and caps off the holes, and constructs a Riemannian metric on each of these pieces by modifying the metric on M, and then restarts the Ricci flow. This seems rather a mess: my impression is that it involves making several choices so is not really canonical, and has a discontinuity in the metric and topology on M. If the flow were given by sections of a canonical smooth 4-manifold as in the question this would give a cleaner way to look at the surgeries of Ricci flow.



(Presumably if the answer to the question is "yes" this is not easy to show, otherwise people would not spend so much time on the complicated surgery procedure. But maybe Ricci flow experts know some reason why this does not work.)

No comments:

Post a Comment