A new parabolic flow in Kähler manifolds (Q1769349)

Donaldson defined a parabolic flow of potentials on Kähler manifolds which arises from considering the action of a group of symplectomorphisms on the space of smooth maps between manifolds. A moment map of this action was considered and then the gradient flow of the square of its norm was taken. Chen discovered the same flow as a gradient flow of a functional related to Mabuchi's \(K\)-energy. Actually, the author studied (see International Math. Research Notices, 12, 2000) the lower bound of the \(K\)-energy on the Kähler manifold when the first Chern class is negative. This problem is reduced to the problem of solving the existence of critical metrics of a new functional \(J\) introduced both by Chen (in the before mentioned paper) and \textit{S. K. Donaldson} in [Asian J. Math. 3, 1--15, (1999; Zbl 0999.53053)]. Actually, \(J\) is defined on the space \({\mathcal H}=\{\varphi: \omega _{\varphi }=\omega _{0}+i\partial \overline{\partial }\varphi >0\), on \(V\}\) of Kähler potentials on a compact Kähler manifold \(( V^{n},\omega _{0}) \) by its derivative \(\frac{dJ}{dt}=\int_{V}\frac{\partial \varphi }{\partial t}\chi \wedge \frac{\omega _{\varphi }^{n-1}}{(n-1)!}\) (here \(\chi \) is a closed (1,1)-form). The main result of this paper is: 1. This gradient flow of \(J\) always exists for all time for any smooth initial data. Moreover, the length of any smooth curve and the distance between any two metrics decreases under this flow. 2. If the bisectional curvature of \(\chi \) is semi-positive, then the gradient flow exists for all time and converges to a smooth critical metric.