Yannick Sire

This work is a follow-up on the work of the second author with P. Daskalopoulos and J.L. Vázquez. In this latter work, we introduced the Yamabe flow associated to the so-called fractional curvature and prove some existence result of mild (semi-group) solutions. In the present work, we continue this study by proving that for some class of data one can prove actually convergence of the flow in a more general context. We build on the approach simplified in the book of M. Struwe.

As a counterpart of the classical Yamabe problem, a fractional Yamabe flow has been introduced by Jin and Xiong (2014) on the sphere. Here we pursue its study in the context of general compact smooth manifolds with positive fractional curvature. First, we prove that the flow is locally well posed in the weak sense on any compact manifold. If the manifold is locally conformally flat with positive Yamabe invariant, we also prove that the flow is smooth and converges to a constant scalar curvature metric. We provide different proofs using extension properties introduced by Chang and González (2011) for the conformally covariant fractional order operators.