English

A criterion for topological entropy to decrease under normalised Ricci flow

Dynamical Systems 2009-12-18 v3 Differential Geometry

Abstract

In 2004, Manning showed that the topological entropy of the geodesic flow for a surface of negative curvature decreases as the metric evolves under the normalised Ricci flow. It is an interesting open problem, also due to Manning, to determine to what extent such behaviour persists for higher dimensional manifolds. In this short note, we describe the problem and give a strong criterion under which monotonicity of the topological entropy can be established for a short time. In particular, the criterion applies to metrics of negative sectional curvature which are in the same conformal class as a metric of constant negative sectional curvature.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0911.3178,
  title  = {A criterion for topological entropy to decrease under normalised Ricci flow},
  author = {Daniel J. Thompson},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0911.3178},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

Revised version, 5 pages. The previous version was incorrect due to the use of a misquoted result (which was also misstated in the source). The corrected version of the argument applies to a more restricted class of metrics than previously claimed

R2 v1 2026-06-21T14:12:28.470Z