Ancient solutions to the Ricci flow in higher dimensions (Q6136043)

It is well known that the Ricci flow of an arbitrary metric on a compact manifold will generally develop singularities. The ancient solutions play a fundamental role in understanding the formation of singularities as they arise naturally in the blow-up limits. The paper considers nonflat ancient solutions to a Ricci flow \((M^n, g(t))\) for \(t\in (-\infty , 0]\), with bounded nonnegative curvature operator and \(n\geq 4\). A basic hypothesis is the Assumption A: an asymptotic (in the sense of Perelman) shrinking gradient Ricci soliton is the standard cylinder \(\mathbb{S}^{n-1}\times \mathbb{R}\). Section 3 deals with the proof for the main results, namely Theorems 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4. The final section deals with the proof of Theorem 1.5 by using an extension of the barrier construction.