Rate of curvature decay for the contracting cusp Ricci flow (Q2208316)

The Ricci flow \(g(t)\) on a surface \(M\) is a smooth solution to \[ \frac{\partial}{\partial t}g(t)=-2\mathrm{Ric}(g(t))=-2K(t)g(t),\tag{1} \] where \(K(t)\) is the Gauss curvature of the metric \(g(t)\). In this paper, the authors estimated the rate of curvature blow-up as time \(t\searrow 0\) on the contracting hyperbolic cusp Ricci flow solution. Let \(H=h (dx^2+dy^2)\) be the unique complete hyperbolic conformal metric on \(B\setminus\{0\}\) which has a hyperbolic cusp at the origin, where \(B\subset \mathbb{R}^2\) is the unit disc. The conformal factor is given by \(h(x,y)=r^{-2}(\log r)^{-2}\) for \(r=\sqrt{x^2+y^2}\). There is a complete ``contracting cusp'' Ricci flow solution \(g_{cc}(t)=u_{cc}(t)(dx^2+dy^2)\) on the disc \(B\). The first author of this paper conjectured in [\textit{P. M. Topping}, Int. Math. Res. Not. 2012, No. 10, 2356--2376 (2012; Zbl 1246.53092)] that the Gauss curvature \(K_{cc}(t)\) of the metric \(g_{cc}(t)\) should blow up like \(1/{t^2}\) as time \(t\searrow 0\). The main result of this paper is a confirmation of this conjecture. Precisely, the authors obtain that \[ \frac{1}{c_1t^2}\leq \max_B K_{cc}(t)\leq \frac{c_2}{t^2} \] for some constant \(c_2>0\) and any given \(c_1>32\), provided that \(t>0\) is small and depend only on \(c_1\). This behavior is similar to the result by \textit{P. Daskalopoulos} and \textit{R. Hamilton} [Commun. Anal. Geom. 12, No. 1--2, 143--164 (2004; Zbl 1070.53041)]. The proof of the main result relies on the sharp estimates on the conformal factor \(u_{cc}(t)\) of the flow, which is given in Theorem 1.4 of this paper. In particular, to prove the upper bound of the curvature, the authors establish a new Li-Yau type differential Harnack inequality for Ricci flow solutions, which is used to control the upper curvature bound in terms of the upper bound on the conformal factor.