Convergence of Ricci flow solutions to Taub-NUT

Abstract

We study the Ricci flow starting at an SU(2) cohomogeneity-1 metric $g_0$ on ${\mathbb{R}}^4$ with monotone warping coefficients and whose restriction to any hypersphere is a Berger metric. If $g_0$ has bounded Hopf-fiber, curvature controlled by the size of the orbits and opens faster than a paraboloid in the directions orthogonal to the Hopf-fiber, then the flow converges to the Taub-NUT metric $g_{\mathsf{TNUT}}$ in the Cheeger-Gromov sense in infinite time. We also classify the long-time behaviour when $g_0$ is asymptotically flat. In order to identify infinite-time singularity models we obtain a uniqueness result for $g_{\mathsf{TNUT}}$.

49 pages, final version. Accepted in Commun. Partial. Differ. Equ