Regularity and curvature estimate for List's flow in four dimension (Q6174576)

This paper is devoted to List's flow, which is a triple $(M,g(t),\varphi (t))_{t\in (0,T)}$ satisfying \begin{align*} \partial_{t}g(t) &=-2\text{Ric}(g(t))+2d\varphi (t)\otimes d\varphi (t), \\ \partial_{t}\varphi (t) &=\Delta_{g(t)}\varphi (t), \\ g(0) &=g_{0},\quad\varphi (0)=\varphi_{0}, \end{align*} where $\varphi (t):M\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ are smooth functions, $g_{0}$ is a fixed Riemannian metric, and $\varphi_{0}$ is a fixed smooth function on a compact $n$-dimensional Riemannian manifold $M$ without boundary. Before the work by \textit{B. List} [Commun. Anal. Geom. 16, No. 5, 1007--1048 (2008; Zbl 1166.53044)], the Ricci flow system for a Riemannian metric $\partial_{t}g=-2\mathrm{Ric}(g)$ has been used with great success for the construction of canonical metrics on Riemannian manifolds of low dimension. B. List has developed a corresponding theory for canonical objects with a certain physical interpretation. He proved the existence of an entropy $E$ such that the stationary points of List's flow are solutions to the static Einstein vacuum equations, and studied the extended parabolic system \begin{align*} \partial_{t}g &=-2\text{Ric}(g)+2\alpha_{n}d\varphi \otimes d\varphi , \\ \partial_{t}\varphi &=\Delta_{g}\varphi , \end{align*} which is equivalent to the gradient flow of $E$. For applications on noncompact asymptotically flat manifolds, he proved short time existence on complete manifolds in the case when $\varphi $ is a smooth function from $M$ to $\mathbb{R}$. In this paper the author studies List's flow on a compact manifold such that the scalar curvature is bounded. He establishes a time derivative bound for solutions to the heat equation, and derives the existence of a cutoff function (with good properties) whose time derivative and Laplacian are bounded. This can be seen as a parabolic version of Cheeger-Colding's cutoff function in the setting of Ricci lower bound. Based on the above results, the author proves a backward pseudolocality theorem for the List's flow in dimension four. In this, the author needs to prove the $L^{\infty }$ estimate for subsolutions to nonhomogeneous linear heat equations along List's flow using Moser iteration method. As an application, the author obtains that the $L^{2}$-norm of the Riemannian curvature operator is bounded and also gets the limit behavior of the List's flow. More precisely, based on an $L^{2}$-bound on the Riemannian curvature operator and a backward pseudolocality result, the author shows that if $M$ is a compact $4$-dimensional Riemannian manifold, $(M,g(t),\varphi (t)) $ is a List's flow on $[0,T)$, and if the trace of the Ricci tensor $S$ satisfies $|S|\leq 1$ on $M\times \lbrack 0,T),$ and $|\varphi_{0}|\leq 1$, then $(M,g(t),\varphi (t))$ converges to an orbifold in the Cheeger-Gromov sense as $t\rightarrow T$.