Uniqueness and stability of Ricci flow through singularities (Q2153534)

The Ricci flow with surgery, first proposed by \textit{R. S. Hamilton} [J. Differ. Geom. 17, 255--306 (1982; Zbl 0504.53034)] and brought to fruition by \textit{G. Perelman} [The entropy formula for the Ricci flow and its geometric applications, Preprint, \url{arXiv:math/0211159}; Ricci flow with surgery on three-manifolds. Preprint, \url{arXiv:math/0303109}] in his acclaimed proof of the geometrization and Poincaré conjectures has a couple of drawbacks, as pointed out by Perelman himself. Firstly, the surgery itself, which removes singularities, secondly, it depends on a number of choices that are not canonical. Moreover, from the PDE viewpoint, the Ricci flow with surgery fails to provide a theory of solutions to the Ricci flow PDE itself, since the surgery violates the equation. To address the problems above, the second author and \textit{J. Lott} [Acta Math. 219, No. 1, 65--134 (2017; Zbl 1396.53090)] introduced a new notion of weak (or generalized) solutions to Ricci flows in dimension 3 and proved the existence within this class of solutions for arbitrary initial data, as well as further results regarding their geometric and analytical properties. In the present paper the authors continue their study and prove that the weak solutions previously found are uniquely determined by their initial data. This result implies that the associated initial value problem has a canonical weak solution, thereby proving Perelman's conjecture for the problem. Furthermore, the authors also show that this weak solution depends continuously on its initial data and, moreover, that it is a limit of Ricci flows with surgery. These results provide an answer to the long-standing problem of finding a satisfactory theory of weak solutions to the Ricci flow equation in the 3-dimensional case.