Combinatorial Ricci Flows with Applications to the Hyperbolization of Cusped 3-Manifolds

In this paper, we adopt combinatorial Ricci flow to study the existence of hyperbolic structure on cusped 3-manifolds. The long-time existence and the uniqueness for the extended combinatorial Ricci flow are proven for general pseudo 3-manifolds. We prove that the extended combinatorial Ricci flow converges to a decorated hyperbolic polyhedral metric if and only if there exists a decorated hyperbolic polyhedral metric of zero Ricci curvature, and the flow converges exponentially fast in this case. For an ideally triangulated cusped 3-manifold admitting a complete hyperbolic metric, the flow provides an effective algorithm for finding the hyperbolic metric.