Strong spherical rigidity of ancient solutions of expansive curvature flows

Abstract

We consider geometric flows of hypersurfaces expanding by a function of the extrinsic curvature and we show that the homothethic sphere is the unique solution of the flow which converges to a point at the initial time. The result does not require assumptions on the speed other than positivity and monotonicity and it is proved using a reflection argument. Our theorem shows that expanding flows exhibit stronger spherical rigidity, if compared with the classification results of ancient solutions in the contractive case.