The Kähler-Ricci flow on surfaces of positive Kodaira dimension

Abstract

The existence of Kähler-Einstein metrics on a compact Kähler manifold has been the subject of intensive study over the last few decades, following Yau's solution to Calabi's conjecture. The Ricci flow, introduced by Richard Hamilton has become one of the most powerful tools in geometric analysis. We study the Kähler-Ricci flow on minimal surfaces of Kodaira dimension one and show that the flow collapses and converges to a unique canonical metric on its canonical model. Such a canonical is a generalized Kähler-Einstein metric. Combining the results of Cao, Tsuji, Tian and Zhang, we give a metric classification for Käher surfaces with a numerical effective canonical line bundle by the Kähler-Ricci flow. In general, we propose a program of finding canonical metrics on canonical models of projective varieties of positive Kodaira dimension.