Ricci flow and nonnegativity of sectional curvature (Q1769994)

Hamilton and Shi showed that the Ricci flow preserves the nonnegativity of the curvature operator. This paper addresses the problem of the topological consequences of preserving the sectional curvature by the Ricci flow. It is shown that, in the above assuption, a simply-connected complete noncompact Riemannian manifold with bounded nonnegative sectional curvature, must split as the product of a compact manifold with a complete manifold which is diffeomorphic to some Euclidean space. The method used by the author is the study of the deformation of the Buseman function under the time-dependent heat equation, using a new tensor maximum principle [cf. \textit{L. Ni} and \textit{L.-F. Tam}, J. Differ. Geom. 64, 457--524 (2003; Zbl 1088.32013)]. The paper ends with some complete, noncompact examples where the Ricci flow does not preserve the nonnegativity of the (bounded nonnegative) sectional curvature and with the observation that the existence of compact ones is still undecided.