Type II ancient compact solutions to the Yamabe flow (Q1747184)

The authors construct new type II ancient compact solutions to the Yamabe flow. These solutions are rotationally symmetric and converge to a tower of two spheres as \(t\to -\infty\). The ancient solutions to the Yamabe flow are constructed by gluing two exact solutions to the rescaled equations, that is spheres, with narrow cylindrical necks. They use perturbation theory via fixed points arguments based on sharp estimates on ancient solutions of the approximated linear equation and a careful estimation of the error terms. This result can be generalized to the gluing of \(k\) spheres for any \(k\ge 2\) in such a way that the configuration of radii of the spheres was driven by a first-order Toda system as \(t\to -\infty\).