The Yamabe flow on asymptotically flat manifolds (Q6060797)

The authors consider a complete differentiable manifold \(M^{n}\) such that there exists a compact set \(K\subset M^{n}\) and a diffeomorphism \(\Phi :M^{n}\setminus K\rightarrow \mathbb{R}^{N}\setminus B_{R_{0}}\) for some \( R_{0}>0\), a smooth function \(r\geq 1\) on \(M^{n}\) that agrees under the identification \(\Phi \) with the Euclidean radial coordinate \(\left\vert x\right\vert \) in a neighborhood of infinity, and a smooth metric \(\widehat{g}\) on \(M^{n}\) which is equal to the Euclidean metric in a neighborhood of infinity under the identification \(\Phi \). The purpose of the paper is to analyze the long-time existence and convergence of the Yamabe flow \(\frac{ \partial g}{\partial t}=-Rg\), with the initial condition \(g(0)=g_{0}\), where \(R\) is the scalar curvature of the Riemannian metric \(g\) and \((M^{n},g_{0})\) an asymptotically flat manifold taken in the class \(C_{-\tau }^{k+\alpha }(M^{n})\), \(k\geq 2\), \(\alpha \in (0,1)\), given as the subset of \[C_{-\tau }^{k}(M^{n})=\{v\in C^{k}(M)\mid \left\Vert v\right\Vert _{C_{-\tau }^{k}}=\sum_{j=1}^{k}\sup_{M^{n}}r^{\tau +j}\left\vert D_{x}^{j}v\right\vert <\infty \}\]defined by the condition \[\left\Vert v\right\Vert _{C_{-\tau }^{k+\alpha }}\left\Vert v\right\Vert _{C_{-\tau }^{k}}+\sup_{x\neq y\in M^{n}}\min (r(x),r(y))^{\tau +k+\alpha }\frac{\left\vert D_{x}^{k}v(x)-D_{x}^{j}v(y)\right\vert }{d(x,y)^{\alpha }}<\infty.\] A metric \(g\) is said to be a \(C_{-\tau }^{k+\alpha }(M^{n})\) asymptotically flat metric if the number \(\tau \) called the order of the asymptotically flat metric is positive and if \(g-\widehat{g}\in C_{-\tau }^{k+\alpha }(M^{n})\). The first main result proves that if \((M^{n},g_{0})\) is an asymptotically flat manifold which belongs to the class \(C_{-\tau }^{k+\alpha }\), there exists a Yamabe flow starting from it defined for all positive times such that.\((M^{n},g(t))\) remains \(C_{-\tau ^{\prime }}^{k+\alpha }\) asymptotically flat for all \(\tau ^{\prime }\leq min(\tau ,n-2).\) For the second main result, the authors introduce the Yamabe constant \[Y(M^{n},[g_{0}])=\mathrm{inf}_{v\in C_{0}^{\infty }(M^{n}),v\neq 0}\frac{4 \frac{n-1}{n-2}\int_{M^{n}}\left\vert \nabla v\right\vert ^{2}+R_{g_{0}}v^{2}dV_{g_{0}}}{\left( \int_{M^{n}}\left\vert v\right\vert ^{ \frac{2n}{n-2}}dV_{g_{0}}\right) ^{\frac{n-2}{n}}}.\] They prove that if \( (M^{n},g_{0})\) is an asymptotically flat manifold which belongs to the class \(C_{-\tau }^{k+\alpha }\), with \(k\geq 3\), and if \(Y(M^{n},[g_{0}])>0\), then the Yamabe flow \((M^{n},g)\) starting from \((M^{n},g_{0})\) uniformly converges in \(C_{0}^{k+\alpha }\) to the unique \(C_{-\tau }^{k+\alpha }\) asymptotically flat metric \(g_{\infty }\in \lbrack g_{0}]\) as \(t\rightarrow \infty \). If \(Y(M^{n},[g_{0}])\leq 0\), the Yamabe flow \((M^{n},g)\) starting from \((M^{n},g_{0})\) does not converge and the authors give such an example. For the proofs, the authors observe that if \(g\) is a solution to the Yamabe flow, \(g(t)\) remains in the same conformal class along the flow, and this allows to write \(g(t)=u(t)^{\frac{4}{n-2}}g_{0}\). This leads to a relation between \(R_{g}\) and \(R_{g_{0}}\): \[-\frac{4(n-1)}{n-2}\Delta _{g_{_{0}}}u+R_{g_{0}}u=R_{g}u^{\frac{n+2}{n-2}}.\] Thus the Yamabe flow can be rewritten as an evolution equation for the conformal factor \(u(t)\): \[ \frac{\partial }{\partial t}u^{\frac{n+2}{n-2}}=\frac{n+2}{4}\left(\frac{4(n-1)}{ n-2}\Delta _{g_{0}}u-R_{g_{0}}u\right).\] The authors recall some preliminaries on the short-time existence of the Yamabe flow on asymptotically flat manifolds. They here refer to the paper by \textit{L. Cheng} and \textit{A. Zhu} in [J. Math. Phys. 56, No. 10, Article ID 101507, 21 p. (2015; Zbl 1327.83018)] with the notion of fine solution for Yamabe flow. The first main step of the proof is the derivation of bounds on the conformal factors \(u(x,t)\), which leads to an uniform control of the Sobolev constant of \((M^{n},g(t))\) for all positive \(t\). The authors prove the monotonicity of some integral norms of the scalar curvature, some uniform decay of the scalar curvature, and the unweighted convergence of the conformal factor \(u(t)\) as \( t\rightarrow \infty \).