On long-time existence for the flow of static metrics with rotational symmetry (Q641523)

The authors examine the geometric flow whose fixed points correspond to solutions of the static Einstein equations of general relativity. This flow is known to be a certain Hamilton-DeTurck flow (the pullback of a Ricci flow by an evolving diffeomorphism) on \(\mathbb R\times M^n\). The authors study the \(SO(n)\)-rotationally-symmetric case of List's flow under conditions of asymptotic flatness. The idea to investigate this problem is related with Bartnick's definition of a quasi-local mass and by the coupled Ricci-harmonic map flow. The problem also occurs as a Ricci flow with broken \(SO(n+1)\)-symmetry, and arose in a numerical study of the Ricci flow for the thermodynamics of black holes. If the initial data admit no minimal hypersphere, the authors show that the flow is immortal when a single regularity condition holds for the scalar field of List's flow at the origin. The regularity condition can be shown to hold at least for \(n=2\). Otherwise, near a singularity, the flow admits rescalings which converge to an \(SO(n)\)-symmetric ancient Ricci flow on \(\mathbb R^n\).