The Ricci flow for nilmanifolds (Q975582)

The author considers the Ricci flow for simply connected nilmanifolds. This translates to a Ricci flow on the space of nilpotent metric Lie algebras. The evolution of the inner product and the evolution of structure constants are considered, as well as the evolution of these quantities modulo rescaling. Systems of ODEs for some of these flows are set up and their qualitative properties are described. Several results in this work assume the existence of a ``stably Ricci-diagonal basis''; conditions under which such bases exist are given. Explicit solutions for the evolution of soliton metrics under the Ricci flow are also presented.