Ricci flow on manifolds with boundary with arbitrary initial metric

In this paper, we study the Ricci flow on manifolds with boundary. In the paper, we substantially improve Shen’s result [Y. Shen, On Ricci deformation of a Riemannian metric on manifold with boundary, Pacific J. Math. 173 1996, 1, 203–221] to manifolds with arbitrary initial metric. We prove short-time existence and uniqueness of the solution, in which the boundary becomes instantaneously totally geodesic for positive time. Moreover, we prove that the flow we constructed preserves natural boundary conditions. More specifically, if the initial metric has a convex boundary, then the flow preserves positive curvature operator and the PIC1, PIC2 conditions. Moreover, if the initial metric has a two-convex boundary, then the flow preserves the PIC condition.

Deformed $$\sigma $$-models, Ricci flow and Toda field theories

It is shown that the Pohlmeyer map of a $$\sigma $$ σ -model with a toric two-dimensional target space naturally leads to the ‘sausage’ metric. We then elaborate the trigonometric deformation of the $$\mathbb {CP}^{n-1}$$ CP n - 1 -model, proving that its T-dual metric is Kähler and solves the Ricci flow equation. Finally, we discuss a relation between flag manifold $$\sigma $$ σ -models and Toda field theories.