Long-time behavior of 3-dimensional Ricci flow. A: Generalizations of Perelman's long-time estimates (Q680296)

All results of this paper will be used in this and the following three papers to describe 3-dimensional Ricci flows with surgery. First the author defines the notion of Ricci flow with surgery, studies the existence of this flow and presents the long-time curvature estimates of Perelman using the notion of Ricci flow with surgery. New long-time estimates using Perelman's techniques are obtained. In the long-time context, Ricci flows with surgery decompose the manifold into a thick part (which approaches a hyperbolic metric) and a thin part (which collapses at local scales). The first two results of this paper, generalizations of results of Perelman for the case in which the underlying manifold is noncompact and/or has a boundary, are on noncollapsedness controlling curvature and on bounded curvature at bounded distance from noncollapsed regions. The following results characterize the Ricci flow in regions that are collapsed, but that become noncollapsed when the author considers the universal or local cover for the manifold. These are results on bounded curvature around good points, bounded curvature at bounded distance from sufficiently collapsed and good regions, curvature control at points that are good relative to regions whose boundary is geometrically controlled, controlled diameter growth of regions whose boundary is sufficiently collapsed and good, curvature control in large regions that are locally good everywhere. In Part D [Zbl 1388.53061], the author analyzes long-time existent Ricci flow with surgery and uses tools from Part A [Zbl 1388.53058] for obtaining a bound on curvature and the geometry in regions of the manifold on a time interval of small but uniform size.