Some aspects of Ricci flow on the 4-sphere

Abstract

In this paper, on 4-spheres equipped with Riemannian metrics we study some integral conformal invariants, the sign and size of which under Ricci flow characterize the standard 4-sphere. We obtain a conformal gap theorem, and for Yamabe metrics of positive scalar curvature with $L^2$ norm of the Weyl tensor of the metric suitably small, we establish the monotonic decay of the $L^p$ norm for certain $p>2$ of the reduced curvature tensor along the normalized Ricci flow, with the metric converging exponentially to the standard 4-sphere.