Long-time existence of the edge Yamabe flow (Q2317155)

The normalized Yamabe flow is a geometric evolution equation that evolves a Riemannian metric toward a metric of constant scalar curvature. The Yamabe flow equation preserves the conformal class of the initial metric and thus may be written as a single nonlinear PDE for the conformal factor. In this paper under review, the authors continue the investigation of the Yamabe flow that the authors commenced in [\textit{E. Bahuaud} and \textit{B. Vertman}, Math. Nachr. 287, No. 2--3, 127--159 (2014; Zbl 1305.53065)], where they established short-time existence for the Yamabe flow within a specified class of compact Riemannian spaces with incomplete edge metrics. The authors study the normalized Yamabe flow preserving a class of compact Riemannian manifolds with incomplete edge singularities and negative Yamabe invariant in the paper under review. Preservation of the edge structure along the flow can be thought of as a boundary condition. The main results of this paper include long-time existence, uniqueness and convergence for the edge Yamabe flow in the case of the initial edge metric with negative scalar curvature. Note that in a singular setting, the classical analysis in the compact setting cannot be applied directly and even short-time existence of the Yamabe flow was non-trivial. Hence, the classical maximum principle needs to be suitably modified to incorporate the singular edge boundary and one has to develop a suitable replacement for the Krylov-Safolov estimate. It is remarkable that the authors proved a new version of a maximum principle on singular spaces which specifies regularity of a function instead of reducing the statement to the classical setting by a smart choice of barrier functions. As a direct application of the above mentioned novel maximum principle, the authors proved that the normalized Yamabe flow of dimension at least \(3\) with incomplete edge has a unique solution for a short time, and if the initial scalar curvature is negative, then the flow exists for all time and converges to a metric of negative constant scalar curvature.