Some aspects of Ricci flow on the 4-sphere

In this paper, on 4-spheres equipped with Riemannian metrics we study some integral conformal invariants, the sign and size of which under Ricci flow characterize the standard 4-sphere. We obtain a conformal gap theorem, and for Yamabe metrics of positive scalar curvature with L^2 norm of the Weyl tensor of the metric suitably small, we establish the monotonic decay of the L^p norm for certain p>2 of the reduced curvature tensor along the normalized Ricci flow, with the metric converging exponentially to the standard 4-sphere.

Noether-Wald charges in six-dimensional Critical Gravity

It has been recently shown that there is a particular combination of conformal invariants in six dimensions which accepts a generic Einstein space as a solution. The Lagrangian of this Conformal Gravity theory — originally found by Lu, Pang and Pope (LPP) — can be conveniently rewritten in terms of products and covariant derivatives of the Weyl tensor. This allows one to derive the corresponding Noether prepotential and Noether-Wald charges in a compact form. Based on this expression, we calculate the Noether-Wald charges of six-dimensional Critical Gravity at the bicritical point, which is defined by the difference of the actions for Einstein-AdS gravity and the LPP Conformal Gravity. When considering Einstein manifolds, we show the vanishing of the Noether prepotential of Critical Gravity explicitly, which implies the triviality of the Noether-Wald charges. This result shows the equivalence between Einstein-AdS gravity and Conformal Gravity within its Einstein sector not only at the level of the action but also at the level of the charges.

Conformal Invariants in Simply Connected Domains

This paper studies the numerical computation of several conformal invariants of simply connected domains in the complex plane including, the hyperbolic distance, the reduced modulus, the harmonic measure, and the modulus of a quadrilateral. The used method is based on the boundary integral equation with the generalized Neumann kernel. Several numerical examples are presented. The performance and accuracy of the presented method is validated by considering several model problems with known analytic solutions.