Harnack inequalities

In this paper, we give a new proof of Perelman's pseudolocality theorem for Ricci flow, which does not rely on Perelman's Harnack-type inequality. The key step is an estimate relating initial local $\mu$-entropy to pointed Nash entropy at later spacetime points. The argument also works for other reasonable geometric flows, like the $G_2$-Laplacian flow, at a scale depending on its deviation from Ricci flow and its scalar curvature lower bound. As a consequence, we can also prove the quantitative rigidity results concerning pointed Nash entropy due to Hein-Naber and Bamler for such geometric flows. In the appendix, we also show that the other results in Bamler's work (arXiv:2008.07093), when suitably modified, remain valid for Laplacian flow with bounded torsion. These include log-Sobolev/Poincaré inequality for conjugate heat kernel measure, heat kernel estimates, and dependence of the pointed Nash entropy on its basepoint.

In this paper, we study the singularity behavior of immersed locally convex closed plane curves evolving under generalized anisotropic Gage area-preserving flows with slow curvature speeds of the form ${\kappa }_{\sigma }^{\alpha }$, where $0<\alpha \le 1$. Here ${\kappa }_{\sigma }$ denotes the anisotropic curvature associated with a prescribed anisotropy function $\sigma$. We prove that every finite-time blow-up is of Type-II provided that the Euclidean length of the evolving curve remains uniformly bounded away from zero. This result holds without any symmetry assumptions on either the initial curve or the anisotropy. When the initial signed area is nonzero, this length lower bound is automatically satisfied, and thus any finite-time singularity is necessarily of Type-II. By means of Hamilton's rescaling method combined with a differential Harnack estimate, we show that along a suitable blow-up subsequence, the rescaled curves at the selected times converge locally to the profile of a translating solution of the corresponding anisotropic curvature flow $V={\kappa }_{\sigma }^{\alpha }$. We also establish sufficient conditions for finite-time singularity formation in terms of the initial signed area and anisotropic length. Moreover, we construct locally convex initial curves arbitrarily close to the Wulff curve for which a finite-time Type-II singularity occurs.

We prove an anisotropic analogue of the higher regularity theorem of Huisken and Ilmanen for inverse mean curvature flow. For an arbitrary smooth Minkowski norm, we first prove a Huisken–Ilmanen type Harnack estimate for smooth closed strictly star-shaped solutions. We then construct global smooth solutions starting from $C^1$ strictly star-shaped hypersurfaces with bounded nonnegative weak anisotropic mean curvature. Combining this construction with the asymptotic theory for weak inverse anisotropic mean curvature flow, we show that weak solutions starting from bounded smooth initial sets become smooth outside a compact set.

We will show that the distance between two minimal hypersurfaces is a Lipschitz continuous supersolution, in the viscosity sense, of a natural elliptic partial differential equation. This not only recovers several well-known properties of minimal hypersurfaces, but also encodes substantially richer information. Moreover, if the reference hypersurface is allowed to evolve by mean curvature flow, one obtains comparably strong estimates for a corresponding parabolic PDE, leading in particular to local Harnack inequalities for the distance. There is even a fully parabolic extension in which both hypersurfaces evolve. The problem of tracking the distance between two evolving hypersurfaces arises naturally in a wide range of settings.

The curve shortening flow is a geometric heat equation for curves and provides an accessible setting to illustrate many important concepts from nonlinear partial differential equations, including maximum principle estimates, monotonicity formulas, Harnack inequalities and blowup analysis. All these techniques will be combined to give an exposition of Huisken's proof of Grayson's beautiful theorem that the curve shortening flow shrinks any closed embedded curve in the plane to a round point.

Hamilton's pinching conjecture, that three-dimensional complete non-compact manifolds with pinched Ricci curvature are flat, has recently been resolved using Ricci flow. In this paper we prove a direct analogue of that result in all dimensions. In order to do so we develop a lifting technique that allows us to handle manifolds that are collapsed at infinity. This new method also gives an alternative way of handling collapsed manifolds in the known three-dimensional case. As part of this approach, we prove a Ricci flow curvature estimate of a type that would normally be derived from the Harnack inequality, but without requiring the strong curvature positivity hypothesis demanded by Harnack. We give an improved gap theorem as a further application.

In 1995, Hamilton introduced a Harnack inequality for convex solutions of the mean curvature flow. In this paper we prove an alternative Harnack inequality for curve shortening flow, i.e. one-dimensional mean curvature flow, that does not require any assumption of convexity. For an initial proper curve in the plane whose ends are radial lines but which is otherwise arbitrarily wild, we use the Harnack inequality to give an explicit time by which the curve shortening flow evolution must become graphical. This gives a new instance of delayed parabolic regularity. The Harnack inequality also gives estimates describing how a polar graphical flow with radial ends settles down to an expanding solution. Finally, we relate our Harnack inequality to Hamilton's by identifying a pointwise curvature estimate implied by both Harnack inequalities in the special case of convex flows.

We develop a dynamical method for proving the sharp Berezin-Li-Yau inequality. The approach is based on the volume-preserving mean curvature flow and a new monotonicity principle for the Riesz mean $R_{\Lambda }({\Omega }_t)$. For convex domains we show that $R_{\Lambda }$ is monotone non-decreasing along the flow. The key input is a geometric correlation inequality between the boundary spectral density $Q_{\Lambda }$ and the mean curvature $H$, established in all dimensions: in $d=2$ via a near-disk Fourier analysis, and in $d\ge 3$ via the boundary Weyl expansion together with a local spectral rigidity argument near the ball, with a first-zero exclusion principle closing the global step. Since the flow converges smoothly to the ball, the monotonicity implies the sharp Berezin-Li-Yau bound for every smooth convex domain. As an application, we obtain a sharp dynamical Cesàro-Pólya inequality for eigenvalue averages.

In this paper, we prove a Li-Yau-Hamilton type Harnack estimate for the $f$-mean curvature flow in Euclidean space, which can be viewed as a gradient flow of the weighed area functional with the measure density function $e^{-f}$.

In this paper, we study Perelman' s $\mathcal{W}$ entropy for mean curvature flow in ${\mathbb{R}}^{n+1}$. Analogously to Perelman's $\mathcal{W}$-entropy defined for Ricci flow, K. Ecker in defined a functional $\mathcal{W}$ for the mean curvature flow in ${\mathbb{R}}^{n+1}$ and the region it encloses, and made the conjecture that this functional is monotonically increasing in time. We modify K. Ecker's definition and, using Hamilton's Harnack inequality for mean curvature flow, prove that our redefined $\mathcal{W}$-entropy is monotonically decreasing in time. Additionally, we provide a rigidity theorem for this $\mathcal{W}$-entropy.

The main objective of this article is to study the mean curvature flow into an ambient compact smooth manifold M with boundary and with a Riemannian metric that evolves by a self-similar solution of the Ricci flow coupled with the harmonic map heat flow of a map from M to a Riemannian manifold N. In this context, we address a functional associated with this flow and calculate its variation along parameters that preserve the weighted volume measure. An extension of Hamilton's differential Harnack expression appears by considering the boundary of M evolving by mean curvature flow, which must vanish on the gradient steady soliton case. Next, we obtain a Huisken monotonicity-type formula for the mean curvature flow in the proposed background. We also show how to construct a family of mean curvature solitons and establish a characterization of such a family.

Optimal transport plays a major role in the study of manifolds with Ricci curvature bounded below. Some results in this setting have been extended to super Ricci flows, revealing a unified approach to analysis on Ricci nonnegative manifolds and Ricci flows. However we observe that the monotonicity of Perelman's functionals ($\mathcal{F}$, $\mathcal{W}$, reduced volume), which hold true for Ricci flows and Ricci nonnegative manifolds, cannot be strictly generalized to super Ricci flows. In 2010 Buzano introduced a condition which still generalizes Ricci flows and Ricci nonnegative manifolds, and on which Perelman's monotonicities do hold. We provide characterizations of this condition using optimal transport and understand it heuristically as Ricci nonnegativity of the space-time. This interpretation is consistent with its equivalence to Ricci nonnegativity on Perelman's infinite dimensional manifold. More precisely, we prove that for smooth evolutions of Riemannian manifolds, this condition is equivalent to a Bochner inequality (resembling Perelman's Harnack inequality but for the forward heat flow), a gradient estimate for the heat flow, a Wasserstein contraction along the adjoint heat flow, the convexity of a modified entropy along Wasserstein geodesics, and an Evolutionary Variational Inequality (EVI). The optimal transport statements use Perelman's $L$ distance as cost, as first studied on Ricci flows by Topping and by Lott. We also consider dimensionally improved and weighted versions of these conditions. The dimensional Bochner inequality and all gradient estimates for the forward heat equation, along with the EVIs, appear to be new even for general Ricci flows, and are related to the Hamiltonian perspective on the $L$ distance. Most of our proofs do not use tensor calculus or Jacobi fields, suggesting the possibility of future extensions to more singular settings.

In this paper, we establish Li-Yau-type and Hamilton-type estimates for positive solutions to the heat equation associated with the generalized Ricci flow, under a less stringent curvature condition. Compared with [25] and [35], these estimates generalize the results in Ricci flow to this new flow under the weaker Ricci curvature bounded assumption. As an application, we derive the Harnack-type inequalities in spacetime and find the monotonicity of one parabolic frequency for positive solutions of the heat equation under bounded Ricci curvature.

In this paper, we extend Perelman's $W$-entropy formula and the concavity of the Shannon entropy power from smooth Ricci flow to super Ricci flows on metric measure spaces. Moreover, we prove the Li-Yau-Hamilton-Perelman Harnack inequality on super Ricci flows. As a significant application, we prove the equivalence between the volume non-local collapsing property and the lower boundedness of the $W$-entropy on RCD$(0,N)$ spaces. Finally, we use the $W$-entropy to study the logarithmic Sobolev inequality with optimal constant on super Ricci flows on metric measure spaces.

The goal of this paper is to relax convexity assumption on some classical results in mean curvature flow. In the first half of the paper, we prove a generalized version of Hamilton's differential Harnack inequality which holds for mean convex solutions to mean curvature flow with a lower bound on $\frac{{\lambda }_1}{H}$ where ${\lambda }_1$ is the smallest principal curvature. Then, we use classical maximum principle to provide several characterizations of family of shrinking spheres for closed, mean convex ancient solution to mean curvature flow with a lower bound on $\frac{{\lambda }_1+..+{\lambda }_k}{H}$ for some $1\le k\le d-1$, where ${\lambda }_1\le {\lambda }_2\le ..\le {\lambda }_d$ are the principal curvatures.

This paper investigates curve flows on the light-cone in the 3-dimensional Minkowski space. We derive the Harnack inequality for the heat flow and present a detailed classification of space-periodic solitons for a third-order curvature flow. The nontrivial periodic solutions to this flow are expressed in terms of the Jacobi elliptic sine function. Additionally, the closed soliton solutions form a family of transcendental curves, denoted by ${\mathrm{x}}_{p,q}$, which are characterized by a rotation index $p$ and close after $q$ periods of their curvature functions. The ratio $p/q$ satisfies $p/q\in (\sqrt{2/3},1)$, where $p$ and $q$ are relatively prime positive integers. Guided by the classification process, we obtain the analytic solutions to a second-order nonlinear ordinary differential equation.

In this short survey paper, we first recall the log gradient estimates for the heat equation on manifolds by Li-Yau, R. Hamilton and later by Perelman in conjunction with the Ricci flow. Then we will discuss some of their applications and extensions focusing on sharp constants and improved curvature conditions.

We show the (normalized) Li-Yau conformal volume of a self-shrinker of mean curvature flow in Euclidean space bounds its Colding-Minicozzi entropy from below. This bound is independent of codimension and sharp on planes. As an application we verify a conjecture of Colding-Minicozzi about the entropy of closed self-shrinkers of arbitrary codimension for self-shrinkers that are topologically two-dimensional real projective planes. As part of the proof we introduce two auxiliary functionals which we call stable conformal volume and virtual entropy which should be of independent interest.

Metric measure spaces with synthetic Ricci bounds have attracted great interest in recent years, accompanied by spectacular breakthroughs and deep new insights. In this survey, I will provide a brief introduction to the concept of lower Ricci bounds as introduced by Lott-Villani and myself, and illustrate some of its geometric, analytic and probabilistic consequences, among them Li-Yau estimates, coupling properties for Brownian motions, sharp functional and isoperimetric inequalities, rigidity results, and structural properties like rectifiability and rectifiability of the boundary. In particular, I will explain its crucial interplay with the heat flow and its link to the curvaturedimension condition formulated in functional-analytic terms by Bakry-Èmery. This equivalence between the Lagrangian and the Eulerian approach then will be further explored in various recent research directions: i) time-dependent Ricci bounds which provide a link to (super-) Ricci flows for singular spaces, ii) second order calculus, upper Ricci bounds, and transformation formulas, iii) distribution-valued Ricci bounds which e.g. allow singular effects of non-convex boundaries to be taken into account.

In this article we derive gradient estimation for positive solution of the equation \beginequation* (\partial_t-Δ_f)u = A(u)p(x,t) + B(u)q(x,t) + \mathcalG(u) \endequation* on a weighted Riemannian manifold evolving along the $(k,m)$ super Perelman-Ricci flow \beginequation* \frac{\partial g}{\partial t}(x,t)+2Ric_f^m(g)(x,t)\ge -2kg(x,t). \endequation* As an application of gradient estimation we derive a Harnack type inequality along with a Liouville type theorem.