Ricci Flow with Ricci Curvature and Volume Bounded Below

Abstract

We show that a simply-connected closed four-dimensional Ricci flow whose Ricci curvature is uniformly bounded below and whose volume does not approach zero must converge to a $C^{0}$ orbifold at any finite-time singularity, so has an extension through the singularity via orbifold Ricci flow. Moreover, a Type-I blowup of the flow based at any orbifold point converges to a flat cone in the Gromov-Hausdorff sense, without passing to a subsequence. In addition, we prove $L^{p}$ bounds for the curvature tensor on time-slices for any $p<2$. In higher dimensions, we show that every singular point of the flow is a Type-II point, and that any tangent flow at a singular point is a static flow corresponding to a Ricci flat cone.