We prove that Ricci flows with almost maximal extinction time must be nearly round, provided that they have positive isotropic curvature when crossed with $mathbb{R}^{2}$. As an application, we show that positively curved metrics on $S^{3}$ and $RP^{3}$ with almost maximal width must be nearly round.
We classify four-dimensional shrinking Ricci solitons satisfying $Sec geq frac{1}{24} R$, where $Sec$ and $R$ denote the sectional and the scalar curvature, respectively. They are isometric to either $mathbb{R}^{4}$ (and quotients), $mathbb{S}^{4}$, $mathbb{RP}^{4}$ or $mathbb{CP}^{2}$ with their standard metrics.
We will show the Cheeger-Colding segment inequality for manifolds with integral Ricci curvature bound. By using this segment inequality, the almost rigidity structure results for integral Ricci curvature will be derived by a similar method as in cite{CC1}. And the sharp Holder continuity result of cite{CoN} holds in the limit space of manifolds with integral Ricci curvature bound.
We generalize most of the known Ricci flow invariant non-negative curvature conditions to less restrictive negative bounds that remain sufficiently controlled for a short time. As an illustration of the contents of the paper, we prove that metrics whose curvature operator has eigenvalues greater than $-1$ can be evolved by the Ricci flow for some uniform time such that the eigenvalues of the curvature operator remain greater than $-C$. Here the time of existence and the constant $C$ only depend on the dimension and the degree of non-collapsedness. We obtain similar generalizations for other invariant curvature conditions, including positive biholomorphic curvature in the Kaehler case. We also get a local version of the main theorem. As an application of our almost preservation results we deduce a variety of gap and smoothing results of independent interest, including a classification for non-collapsed manifolds with almost non-negative curvature operator and a smoothing result for singular spaces coming from sequences of manifolds with lower curvature bounds. We also obtain a short-time existence result for the Ricci flow on open manifolds with almost non-negative curvature (without requiring upper curvature bounds).
We develop a compactness theory for super Ricci flows, which lays the foundations for the partial regularity theory in [Bam20b]. Our results imply that any sequence of super Ricci flows of the same dimension that is pointed in an appropriate sense subsequentially converges to a certain type of synthetic flow, called a metric flow. We will study the geometric and analytic properties of this limiting flow, as well as the convergence in detail. We will also see that, under appropriate local curvature bounds, a limit of Ricci flows can be decomposed into a regular and singular part. The regular part can be endowed with a canonical structure of a Ricci flow spacetime and we have smooth convergence on a certain subset of the regular part.