Combinatorial Calabi flow for ideal circle pattern (Q6994779)

Ideal circle patterns are collections of circles on a compact oriented closed surface with a fixed triangulation \(\mathcal{T}\), which fulfill certain properties restricting their intersection behavior and their connection to the triangulation. Furthermore, it is required that there exists a triangulation of geodesics isotopic to \(\mathcal{T}\) with vertices given by the centers of the circles. Hence, every ideal circle pattern induces a curvature for every vertex via the sum of the angles of all adjacent geodesic triangles. This article examines the combinatorial Calabi flow introduced in [\textit{H. Ge}, Combinatorial methods and geometric equations. Peking: Peking Univ. (Diss.) (2012)] to construct ideal circle patterns with specified curvature at each vertex.\N\NThe authors show that -- if the fixed curvature vector is attainable -- the combinatorial Calabi flow exists for all time and converges exponentially fast to a radius vector corresponding to an ideal circle pattern with the fixed curvatures. Both results are obtained for hyperbolic as well as for Euclidean geometry. The long time existence is proved via the use of Lyapunov functions and an energy function measuring the distance from the target is used for the convergence results.