Ricci flow on surfaces with conic singularities

Rafe Mazzeo, Yanir A. Rubinstein, Natasa Sesum

Published 2013-06-28, updated 2014-11-11Version 3

We establish the short-time existence of the Ricci flow on surfaces with a finite number of conic points, all with cone angle between 0 and $2\pi$, where the cone angles remain fixed or change in some smooth prescribed way. For the angle-preserving flow we prove long-time existence and convergence. When the Troyanov angle condition is satisfied (equivalently, when the data is logarithmically K-stable), the flow converges to the unique constant curvature metric with the given cone angles; if this condition is not satisfied, the flow converges subsequentially to a soliton. This is the one-dimensional version of the Hamilton--Tian conjecture.