WITTEN DEFORMATION FOR NONCOMPACT MANIFOLDS WITH BOUNDED GEOMETRY

Motivated by the Landau–Ginzburg model, we study the Witten deformation on a noncompact manifold with bounded geometry, together with some tameness condition on the growth of the Morse function f near infinity. We prove that the cohomology of the Witten deformation $d_{Tf}$ acting on the complex of smooth $L^2$ forms is isomorphic to the cohomology of the Thom–Smale complex of f as well as the relative cohomology of a certain pair $(M, U)$ for sufficiently large T. We establish an Agmon estimate for eigenforms of the Witten Laplacian which plays an essential role in identifying these cohomologies via Witten’s instanton complex, defined in terms of eigenspaces of the Witten Laplacian for small eigenvalues. As an application, we obtain the strong Morse inequalities in this setting.

Some local maximum principles along Ricci flows

In this work, we obtain a local maximum principle along the Ricci flow $g(t)$ under the condition that $\mathrm {Ric}(g(t))\le {\alpha } t^{-1}$ for $t>0$ for some constant ${\alpha }>0$ . As an application, we will prove that under this condition, various kinds of curvatures will still be nonnegative for $t>0$ , provided they are non-negative initially. These extend the corresponding known results for Ricci flows on compact manifolds or on complete noncompact manifolds with bounded curvature. By combining the above maximum principle with the Dirichlet heat kernel estimates, we also give a more direct proof of Hochard’s [15] localized version of a maximum principle by Bamler et al. [1] on the lower bound of different kinds of curvatures along the Ricci flows for $t>0$ .