Producing 3D Ricci flows with nonnegative Ricci curvature via singular Ricci flows (Q2078919)

The singular Ricci flow is a kind of weak solution of Ricci flow on a 3-dimensional manifold \((M,g)\), which is related to the limit of the Perelman Ricci flow with surgery when the surgery scale \(\delta>0\) approaches zero. The singular Ricci flow for \(3D\) compact manifold \((M,g)\) was constructed by \textit{B. Kleiner} and \textit{J. Lott} [Acta Math. 219, No. 1, 65--134 (2017; Zbl 1396.53090)]. In the paper under review, the author introduces a new generalized singular Ricci flow which allows the initial manifold to be a 3D complete Riemannian manifold with possibly unbounded curvature. As the main result, she proved that for any \(3D\) complete Riemannian manifold \((M,g)\), there exists a generalized singular Ricci flow starting from \((M,g)\). The proof depends on a compactness theorem for singular Ricci flow, which says that a sequence of singular Ricci flows converges to a generalized singular Ricci flow starting from a complete manifold \((M,g)\) if the sequence of their initial manifolds converges to \((M,g)\). The existence result of the generalized singular Ricci flow is useful to attack an open question proposed by \textit{P. M. Topping} [Lect. Notes Math. 2263, 79--112 (2020; Zbl 1453.53004)], which asks whether a smooth complete Ricci flow exists for a \(3D\) complete manifold with nonnegative Ricci curvature. In this paper, the author provides a partial answer to this question and shows that starting from any \(3D\) complete Riemannian manifold \((M,g)\) with nonnegative Ricci curvature, there exists a smooth Ricci flow \((M,g(t))\) on \([0,T)\) with \(g(0)=g\), and the curvature \(|\mathrm{Rm}|\) blows up as \(t\to T\) if \(T<\infty\). For the proof, the author first applies the maximum principle to show that the generalized singular Ricci flow \(\mathcal{M}\) preserves the nonnegativity of the Ricci curvature, and then proves that \(\mathcal{M}\) is in fact a smooth Ricci flow spacetime. The smooth Ricci flow starting from \((M,g)\) is then produced by restricting the spacetime on \(M\).