A Maximum Principle for Combinatorial Yamabe Flow

A combinatorial version of Yamabe flow is presented based on Euclidean triangulations coming from sphere packings. The evolution of curvature is then derived and shown to satisfy a heat equation. The Laplacian in the heat equation is shown to be a geometric analogue of the Laplacian of Riemannian geometry, although the maximum principle need not hold. It is then shown that if the flow is nonsingular, the flow converges to a constant curvature metric.

In this paper, we introduce a new combinatorial curvature on two and three dimensional triangulated manifolds, which transforms in the same way as that of the smooth scalar curvature under scaling of the metric and could be used to approximate the Gauss curvature on two dimensional manifolds. Then we use the flow method to study the corresponding constant curvature problem, which is called combinatorial Yamabe problem.

In this paper we develop an approach to conformal geometry of piecewise flat metrics on manifolds. In particular, we formulate the combinatorial Yamabe problem for piecewise flat metrics. In the case of surfaces, we define the combinatorial Yamabe flow on the space of all piecewise flat metrics associated to a triangulated surface. We show that the flow either develops removable singularities or converges exponentially fast to a constant combinatorial curvature metric. If the...

This paper studies the combinatorial Yamabe flow on hyperbolic surfaces with boundary. It is proved by applying a variational principle that the length of boundary components is uniquely determined by the combinatorial conformal factor. The combinatorial Yamabe flow is a gradient flow of a concave function. The long time behavior of the flow and the geometric meaning is investigated.

We introduce a combinatorial curvature flow for PL metrics on compact triangulated 3-manifolds with boundary consisting of surfaces of negative Euler characteristic. The flow tends to find the complete hyperbolic metric with totally geodesic boundary on a manifold. Some of the basic properties of the combinatorial flow are established. The most important ones is that the evolution of the PL curvature satisfies a combinatorial heat equation. It implies that the total curvature...

This article presents an analysis of the normalized Yamabe flow starting at and preserving a class of compact Riemannian manifolds with incomplete edge singularities and negative Yamabe invariant. Our main results include uniqueness, long-time existence and convergence of the edge Yamabe flow starting at a metric with everywhere negative scalar curvature. Our methods include novel maximum principle results on the singular edge space without using barrier functions. Moreover, ...

Discrete conformal structure on polyhedral surfaces is a discrete analogue of the smooth conformal structure on surfaces that assigns discrete metrics by scalar functions defined on vertices. In this paper, we introduce combinatorial $\alpha$-curvature for discrete conformal structures on polyhedral surfaces, which is a parameterized generalization of the classical combinatorial curvature. Then we prove the local and global rigidity of combinatorial $\alpha$-curvature with re...

In this paper, we introduce two discrete curvature flows, which are called $\alpha$-flows on two and three dimensional triangulated manifolds. For triangulated surface $M$, we introduce a new normalization of combinatorial Ricci flow (first introduced by Bennett Chow and Feng Luo \cite{CL1}), aiming at evolving $\alpha$ order discrete Gauss curvature to a constant. When $\alpha\chi(M)\leq0$, we prove that the convergence of the flow is equivalent to the existence of constant ...

This paper investigates the combinatorial $\alpha$-curvature for vertex scaling of piecewise hyperbolic metrics on polyhedral surfaces, which is a parameterized generalization of the classical combinatorial curvature. A discrete uniformization theorem for combinatorial $\alpha$-curvature is established, which generalizes Gu-Guo-Luo-Sun-Wu's discrete uniformization theorem for classical combinatorial curvature. We further introduce combinatorial $\alpha$-Yamabe flow and combin...

Let (M,g) be a compact oriented Riemannian manifold with an incomplete edge singularity. This article shows that it is possible to evolve g by the Yamabe flow within a class of singular edge metrics. As the main analytic step we establish parabolic Schauder-type estimates for the heat operator on certain H\"older spaces adapted to the singular edge geometry. We apply these estimates to obtain local existence for a variety of quasilinear equations, including the Yamabe flow. T...