On Wilking’s criterion for the Ricci flow

Abstract

Wilking has recently shown that one can associate a Ricci flow invariant cone of curvature operators $C(S)$, which are nonnegative in a suitable sense, to every $Ad_{SO(n,\mathbb{C })}$ invariant subset $S \subset \mathbf{so}(n,\mathbb{C })$. In this article we show that if $S$ is an $Ad_{SO(n,\mathbb{C })}$ invariant subset of $\mathbf{so}(n,\mathbb{C })$ such that $S\cup \{0\}$ is closed and $C_+(S)\subset C(S)$ denotes the cone of curvature operators which are positive in the appropriate sense then one of the two possibilities holds: (a) The connected sum of any two Riemannian manifolds with curvature operators in $C_+(S)$ also admits a metric with curvature operator in $C_+(S)$ (b) The normalized Ricci flow on any compact Riemannian manifold $M$ with curvature operator in $C_+(S)$ converges to a metric of constant positive sectional curvature. We also point out that if $S$ is an arbitrary $Ad_{SO(n,\mathbb{C })}$ subset, then $C(S)$ is contained in the cone of curvature operators with nonnegative isotropic curvature.