Ricci flow smoothing for locally collapsing manifolds

Abstract

We show that for certain locally collapsing initial data with Ricci curvature bounded below, one could start the Ricci flow for a definite period of time. This provides a Ricci flow smoothing tool, with which we find topological conditions that detect the collapsing infranil fiber bundles over controlled Riemannian orbifolds among those locally collapsing regions with Ricci curvature bounded below. In the appendix, we also provide a local distance distortion estimate for certain Ricci flows with collapsing initial data.