Yamabe flow

For every $n\ge 3$, we construct uncountably many families of type II ancient solutions to the Yamabe flow on the unit round $n$-sphere ${\text{Ss}}^n$. These families are pairwise distinct up to conformal equivalence, and no member is conformally equivalent to a rotationally symmetric solution. At every negative time, the Ricci curvature tensor of each solution is indefinite at some point. Moreover, the associated backward limit space is a wedge sum of finitely many isometric copies of ${\text{Ss}}^n$. These examples show that the collection of ancient Yamabe flows on ${\text{Ss}}^n$ has a much richer structure than suggested by two natural comparison problems: the compact ancient Ricci flows on ${\text{Ss}}^2$, all of which are known to be rotationally symmetric, and the elliptic Yamabe equation on ${\mathbb{R}}^n$, whose positive entire solutions are only the standard bubbles. The construction uses a non-radial inner–outer gluing scheme. After stereographic projection, we reformulate the flow as a conformally invariant parabolic problem on ${\mathbb{R}}^n$. By exploiting Kelvin invariance and switching between the Euclidean and spherical formulations as needed, we control the non-radial modes directly without reducing the problem to one space dimension. Weighted Hölder estimates provide the pointwise control needed to establish the Type II behavior, the Ricci-sign property, conformal inequivalence, and the description of the backward limits in a straightforward manner.

Glickenstein introduced the discrete conformal structures on polyhedral surfaces in an axiomatic approach from Riemannian geometry perspective. It includes Thurston's circle packings, Bowers-Stephenson's inversive distance circle packings and Luo's vertex scalings as special cases. In this paper, we study the deformation of Glickenstein's discrete conformal structures by combinatorial curvature flows. The combinatorial Ricci flow for Glickenstein's discrete conformal structures on triangulated surfaces is a generalization of Chow-Luo's combinatorial Ricci flow for Thurston's circle packings and Luo's combinatorial Yamabe flow for vertex scalings. We prove that the solution of the combinatorial Ricci flow for Glickenstein's discrete conformal structures on triangulated surfaces can be uniquely extended. Furthermore, under some necessary conditions, we prove that the solution of the extended combinatorial Ricci flow on a triangulated surface exists for all time and converges exponentially fast for any initial value. We further introduce the combinatorial Calabi flow for Glickenstein's discrete conformal structures on triangulated surfaces and study the basic properties of the flow. These combinatorial curvature flows provide effective algorithms for finding piecewise constant curvature metrics on surfaces with prescribed combinatorial curvatures.