Conformal flows by curvature on compact manifolds (Q2365237)

On a given compact Riemannian manifold \((M,g)\) the author considers conformal flows \(\overline{g}=\overline{g}(t)\) of Riemannian metrics on \(M\) which are solutions of the equation \[ {\partial \overline{g}\over \partial t}=F(\overline{R})\overline{g},\;\overline{g}(O)=e^{2f_0}g, \] where \(\overline{R}\) is the scalar curvature of \(\overline{g}\) and \(F\) and \(f_0\) are smooth functions on \(\mathbb{R}\) and \(M\), respectively, such that \(F'<0\). The choice \(F(\overline{R})=r-\overline{R}\), \(r\) being the mean value of \(\overline{R}\), leads to the case of the so-called Ricci and Yamabe flow, which had been studied before, in particular their asymptotic behaviour. The author considers general smooth functions \(F>0\). The corresponding flows are called expanding flows since the metric is increasing in time. Setting \(\overline{g}=e^{2f}g\) the problem is transformed into a nonlinear partial differential equation for the function \(f\). In a first step it is shown that an expanding flow exists for all times \(t\) up to infinity and the scalar curvature is exponentially decaying. Moreover it is proven that the conveniently renormalized \(\overline{g}\) converges to a metric \(\overline{g}_\infty\) in the \(C^\infty\)-norm. This is achieved by first proving uniform estimates for the Hessian of \(f\) and even for \(\Delta\Delta f\) and then applying a modified bootstrap argument.