English

A mass-decreasing flow in dimension three

Differential Geometry 2011-11-18 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

In this article, we introduce a mass-decreasing flow for asymptotically flat three-manifolds with nonnegative scalar curvature. This flow is defined by iterating a suitable Ricci flow with surgery and conformal rescalings and has a number of nice properties. In particular, wormholes pinch off and nontrivial spherical space forms bubble off in finite time. Moreover, a noncompact variant of the Perelman-energy is monotone along the flow. Assuming a certain inequality between the mass and this Perelman-energy a priori, we can prove that the flow squeezes out all the initial mass.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1107.3220,
  title  = {A mass-decreasing flow in dimension three},
  author = {Robert Haslhofer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1107.3220},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

13 pages (v2: added section about continuum limit; minor additional improvements)

R2 v1 2026-06-21T18:37:47.920Z