On the Kähler-Ricci flow near a Kähler-Einstein metric (Q2254709)

This paper studies the behaviour of the Kähler-Ricci flow on Fano manifolds. Kähler-Einstein metrics are fixed points of the flow. A natural question is to ask what will happen if we start with a metric and a complex structure that is close to a Kähler-Einstein one in the anti-canonical class. This extremely well-written paper answers that question: it will converge to a Kähler-Einstein manifold which is diffeomorphic but not necessarily biholomorphic to the original complex manifold (Theorem 1.1). Moreover, the rate of convergence is polynomial (in contrast to exponential, which is quite often the case with flows). Unlike the usual method of studying the flow at the level of Kähler potentials, this paper studies it as a Ricci flow using Perelman's functional (whose gradient flow on an appropriate infinite-dimensional manifold is the Ricci flow). The key ingredient in the proof is a Lojasiewicz-type inequality for Perelman's functional.