The Weil-Petersson gradient flow for renormalized volume 

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Martin Bridgeman, Boston College

Please note this seminar will take place online via Zoom. You can connect to this seminar via the following link:

https://princeton.zoom.us/j/453512481(link is external)

Renormalized volume was introduced by Graham and Witten for conformally compact Einstein manifolds. Krasnov-Schlenker studied it for convex compact hyperbolic 3-manifolds and proved many of its fundamental properties. In a series of papers, we consider the Weil-Petersson gradient flow of the renormalized volume function VR on the space of convex compact structures CC(N) of a 3-manifold N. For N incompressible, we use the flow to show that the infimum of  VR on CC(N) is the Gromov norm of N. For N acylindrical, we introduce a surgered flow and show that starting at any MCC(N)  the flow limits to Mgeod, the unique manifold with totally geodesic convex core boundary. Using this, we prove a lower bound on the convex core volume function VC on CC(N) given by VC(M)VC(Mgeod)KdWP(M,Mgeod)C.

This is joint work with Jeff Brock and Ken Bromberg