Ricci flow of homogeneous manifolds (Q1955725): Difference between revisions

The author develops a general approach to the Ricci flow \(\dot g_t = - 2\mathrm{Ric}(g_t)\) for invariant metrics \(g_t\) on a homogeneous manifold \(M =G/H\) with a reductive decomposition \(\mathfrak{g} = \mathfrak{h} + \mathfrak{p}\). The main idea is to change the Ricci flow to some equivalent flow for the Lie brackets \(\mu_t \in \Lambda^2 \mathfrak{g}^* \otimes \mathfrak{g} \) which has the form \( \dot \mu_t =- \widehat{\mathrm{Ric}}_t\cdot \mu_t.\) Here \(\widehat{\mathrm{Ric}}_t= \mathrm{diag}(0, \mathrm{Ric})\) is the trivial extension of the Ricci endomorphism \(\mathrm{Ric}_t \in \mathrm{End}(\mathfrak{m})\) of the homogeneous Riemannian manifold defined by the Lie algebra structure \(\mu_t\) on \(\mathfrak{g} = \mathfrak{h} + \mathfrak{p}\) and the fixed Euclidean metric \(\langle\cdot,\cdot\rangle\) on \(\mathfrak{p}\), and ``\(\cdot\)'' means the natural action of an endomorphism on \(\Lambda^2 \mathfrak{g}^* \otimes \mathfrak{g}\). In the case when the group \(G\) is unimodular, \[ \mathrm{Ric}_{\mu} = M_{\mu} - \frac12 B_{\mu}, \] where \(M_{\mu}, \, B_{\mu}\) are symmetric endomorphisms of \((\mathfrak{p},\langle\cdot,\cdot\rangle)\) defined by \[ \langle M_{\mu}, A\rangle :=\langle A \cdot \mu, \mu\rangle \] for any symmetric \( A \in \mathrm{End}(\mathfrak{p})\) trivially extended to an endomorphism of \(\mathfrak{g}\) and \[ \langle B_{\mu}X,Y\rangle := \mathrm{tr}\mathrm{ad}_X \mathrm{ad}_Y,\quad X,Y \in \mathfrak{p}. \] The author describes the relation between the Ricci flow and the bracket flow. The advantage of the bracket flow is that it allows to describe the limit points better when the structure of the Lie group \(G\) and the homogeneous space \(M = G/H\) changes. The general theory is illustrated by two examples: the Ricci flow on a 3-dimensional homogeneous manifold with 1-dimensional stability subgroup and the Ricci flow on some 2-parameter family of left invariant Riemann metrics on a semisimple Lie group.