Deformation of discrete conformal structures on surfaces
Xu Xu
备注：
To appear in Calc. Var. Partial Differential Equations. The proof of Theorem 2.12 has been simplified. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2103.05272
Glickenstein introduced the discrete conformal structures on polyhedral surfaces in an axiomatic approach from Riemannian geometry perspective. It includes Thurston's circle packings, Bowers-Stephenson's inversive distance circle packings and Luo's vertex scalings as special cases. In this paper, we study the deformation of Glickenstein's discrete conformal structures by combinatorial curvature flows. The combinatorial Ricci flow for Glickenstein's discrete conformal structures on triangulated surfaces is a generalization of Chow-Luo's combinatorial Ricci flow for Thurston's circle packings and Luo's combinatorial Yamabe flow for vertex scalings. We prove that the solution of the combinatorial Ricci flow for Glickenstein's discrete conformal structures on triangulated surfaces can be uniquely extended. Furthermore, under some necessary conditions, we prove that the solution of the extended combinatorial Ricci flow on a triangulated surface exists for all time and converges exponentially fast for any initial value. We further introduce the combinatorial Calabi flow for Glickenstein's discrete conformal structures on triangulated surfaces and study the basic properties of the flow. These combinatorial curvature flows provide effective algorithms for finding piecewise constant curvature metrics on surfaces with prescribed combinatorial curvatures.
In \cite{Luo0}, Feng Luo conjectured that the discrete Yamabe flow will converge to the constant curvature PL-metric after finite number of surgeries on the triangulation. In this paper, we prove that the flow can always be extended (without surgeries) to a solution that converges exponentially fast to the constant curvature PL-metric.
We extend to the conformal realm the concept of genuine deformations of submanifolds, introduced by Dajczer and the first author for the isometric case. Analogously to that case, we call a conformal deformation of a submanifold $M^n$ genuine if no open subset of $M^n$ can be included as a submanifold of a higher dimensional conformally deformable submanifold in such a way that the conformal deformation of the former is induced by a conformal deformation of the latter. We describe the geometric structure of a submanifold that admits a genuine conformal deformation and give several applications …
In this paper we study Moebius applicable surfaces, i.e., conformally immersed surfaces in Moebius 3-space which admit deformations preserving the Moebius metric. We show new characterizations of Willmore surfaces, Bonnet surfaces and Harmonic inverse mean curvature surfaces in terms of Moebius or similarity invariants.
We address the problem of second order conformal deformation of spacelike surfaces in compactified Minkowski 4-space. We explain the construction of the exterior differential system of conformal deformations and discuss its general and singular solutions. In particular, we show that isothermic surfaces are singular solutions of the system, which implies that a generic second order deformable surface is not isothermic. This differs from the situation in 3-dimensional conformal geometry, where isothermic surfaces coincide with deformable surfaces.
We show that the class of CAT(0) spaces is closed under suitable conformal changes. In particular, any CAT(0) space admits a large variety of non-trivial deformations.
The conformal properties of complex Finsler metrics are studied. We give a characterization of a compact complex Finsler manifold to be globally conformal Kähler. The critical points of the total holomorphic curvature and total Ricci curvature in the volume preserved conformal classes are studied. The stability of critical Kähler Finsler metrics is obtained. A Yamabe type problem for mean Ricci curvature is considered.
We study infinitesimal conformal deformations of a triangulated surface in Euclidean space and investigate the change in its extrinsic geometry. A deformation of vertices is conformal if it preserves length cross-ratios. On one hand, conformal deformations generalize deformations preserving edge lengths. On the other hand, there is a one-to-one correspondence between infinitesimal conformal deformations in space and infinitesimal isometric deformations of the stereographic image on the sphere. The space of infinitesimal conformal deformations can be parametrized in terms of the change in dihed…
In this article, we found a connection between Brown-York mass and the first Dirichlet Eigenvalue of a Schrödingier type operator. In particular, we proved a local positive mass type theorem for metrics conformal to the background one with suitable presumptions. As applications, we investigated compactly conformal deformations which either increase or decrease scalar curvature. We found local conformal rigidity phenomena occur in both cases for small domains and as for manifolds with nonpositive scalar curvature it is even more rigid in particular. On the other hand, such deformations exist fo…
We discuss conformal deformation and warped products on some open manifolds. We discuss how these can be applied to construct Riemannian metrics with specific scalar curvature functions.
In this paper we classify Euclidean hypersurfaces $f\colon M^n \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^{n+1}$ with a principal curvature of multiplicity $n-2$ that admit a genuine conformal deformation $\tilde{f}\colon M^n \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^{n+2}$. That $\tilde{f}\colon M^n \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^{n+2}$ is a genuine conformal deformation of $f$ means that it is a conformal immersion for which there exists no open subset $U \subset M^n$ such that the restriction $\tilde{f}|_U$ is a composition $\tilde f|_U=h\circ f|_U$ of $f|_U$ with a conformal immersion $h\colon V\to \mathbb{R}^{n+2}$ of an open subset $…
We establish a connection between two previously unrelated topics: a particular discrete version of conformal geometry for triangulated surfaces, and the geometry of ideal polyhedra in hyperbolic three-space. Two triangulated surfaces are considered discretely conformally equivalent if the edge lengths are related by scale factors associated with the vertices. This simple definition leads to a surprisingly rich theory featuring Möbius invariance, the definition of discrete conformal maps as circumcircle preserving piecewise projective maps, and two variational principles. We show how literally…
We consider natural conformal invariants arising from the Gauss-Bonnet formulas on manifolds with boundary, and study conformal deformation problems associated to them. The key technique we used is to derive boundary C^2 estimates directly from C^0 estimates for fully nonlinear equations. The main result has appeared in the author's thesis.
Boundary value problems for operators of Dirac type arise naturally in connection with the conformal geometry of surfaces immersed in Euclidean 3--space. Recently such boundary value problems have been successfully applied to a variety of problems from computer graphics. Here we investigate under which conditions these boundary value problems are elliptic and self--adjoint. We show that under certain periodic deformations of the boundary data our operators exhibit non-trivial spectral flow.
On pseudo-Riemannian manifolds of even dimension $n\geq 4$, with everywhere vanishing (Fefferman-Graham) obstruction tensor, we construct a complex of conformally invariant differential operators. The complex controls the infinitesimal deformations of obstruction-flat structures, and, in the case of Riemannian signature the complex is elliptic.
In this paper we construct compact manifolds with fixed boundary geometry which admit Riemannian metrics of unit volume with arbitrarily large Steklov spectral gap. We also study the effect of localized conformal deformations that fix the boundary geometry. For instance, we prove that it is possible to make the spectral gap arbitrarily large using conformal deformations which are localized on domains of small measure, as long as the support of the deformations contains and connects each component of the boundary.
We consider deformations of metrics in a given conformal class such that the smallest eigenvalue of the Ricci tensor to be a constant. It is related to the notion of minimal volumes in comparison geometry. Such a metric with the smallest eigenvalue of the Ricci tensor to be a constant is an extremal metric of volume in a suitable sense in the conformal class. The problem is reduced to solve a Pucci type equation with respect to the Schouten tensor. We establish a local gradient estimate for this type of conformally invariant fully nonlinear uniform elliptic equations. Combining it with the the…
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 $α$-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 $α$-curvature with respect to discrete conformal structures on polyhedral surfaces, which confirms parameterized Glickenstein rigidity conjecture. To s…
We introduce a new class of discrete conformal structures on surfaces with boundary, which have nice interpolations in 3-dimensional hyperbolic geometry. Then we prove the global rigidity of the new discrete conformal structures using variational principles, which is a complement of Guo-Luo's rigidity of the discrete conformal structures and Guo's rigidity of vertex scaling on surface with boundary. As a result, new convexities of the volume of generalized hyperbolic pyramids with right-angled hyperbolic hexagonal bases are obtained. Motivated by Chow-Luo's combinatorial Ricci flow and Luo's c…
We consider conformal deformations within a class of incomplete Riemannian metrics which generalize conic orbifold singularities by allowing both warping and any compact manifold (not just quotients of the sphere) to be the "link" of the singular set. Within this class of "conic metrics," we determine obstructions to the existence of conformal deformations to constant scalar curvature of any sign (positive, negative, or zero). For conic metrics with negative scalar curvature, we determine sufficient conditions for the existence of a conformal deformation to a conic metric with constant scalar …
We study the deformation of the three-dimensional conformal structures by the Ricci flow. We drive the evolution equation of Cotton-York tensor and the L1-norm of it under the Ricci flow. In particular, we investigate the behavior of the L1-norm of the Cotton-York tensor under the Ricci flow on three-dimensional simply-connected homogeneous manifolds which admit compact quotients. For a non-homogeneous case, we also investigate the behavior of the L1-norm of the Cotton-York tensor for the product metric of the Rosenau solution for the Ricci flow on a two-sphere and the standard metric of a cir…
In this paper, we study deformations of coisotropic submanifolds in a locally conformal symplectic manifold. Firstly, we derive the equation that governs $C^\infty$ deformations of coisotropic submanifolds and define the corresponding $C^\infty$-moduli space of coisotropic submanifolds modulo the Hamiltonian isotopies. Secondly, we prove that the formal deformation problem is governed by an $L_\infty$-structure which is a $\frak b$-deformation of strong homotopy Lie algebroids introduced in Oh and Park (2005) in the symplectic context. Then we study deformations of locally conformal symplectic…
The aim of this paper is to develop on the 1-jet space J^1(R, M^n) the Finsler-like geometry (in the sense of distinguished (d-) connection, d-torsions, d-curvatures and some gravitational-like and electromagnetic-like geometrical models) attached to the (t,x)-conformal deformation of the Berwald-Moor metric.
We study the equation $Δ_g u -\frac{n-2}{4(n-1)}R(g)u+Ku^p=0 (1+ζ\leq p \leq \frac{n+2}{n-2})$ on locally conformally flat compact manifolds $(M^n,g)$. We prove the following: (i) When the scalar curvature $R(g)>0$ and the dimension $n \geq 4$, under suitable conditions on $K$, all positive solutions $u$ have uniform upper and lower bounds; (ii) When the scalar curvature $R(g)\equiv 0$ and $n \geq 5$, under suitable conditions on $K$, all positive solutions $u$ with bounded energy have uniform upper and lower bounds. We also give an example to show that the energy bound condition for the unifo…
In this article, we first show that for all compact Riemannian manifolds with non-empty smooth boundary and dimension at least 3, there exists a metric, pointwise conformal to the original metric, with constant scalar curvature in the interior, and constant scalar curvature on the boundary by considering the boundary as a manifold of its own with dimension at least 2. We then show a series of prescribed scalar curvature results in the interior and on the boundary, with pointwise conformal deformation. These type of results is both an analogy and an extension of Kazdan and Warner's "Trichotomy …
We consider geometries on the space of Riemannian metrics conformally equivalent to the widely studied Ebin L^2 metric. Among these we characterize a distinguished metric that can be regarded as a generalization of Calabi's metric on the space of Kähler metrics to the space of Riemannian metrics, and we study its geometry in detail. Unlike the Ebin metric, the geodesic equation involves non-local terms, and we solve it explicitly by using a constant of the motion. We then determine its completion, which gives the first example of a metric on the space of Riemannian metrics whose completion is …
A piecewise constant curvature manifold is a triangulated manifold that is assigned a geometry by specifying lengths of edges and stipulating that for a chosen background geometry (Euclidean, hyperbolic, or spherical), each simplex has an isometric embedding into the background geometry with the chosen edge lengths. Additional structure is defined either by giving a geometric structure to the Poincare dual of the triangulation or by assigning a discrete metric, a way of assigning length to oriented edges. This notion leads to a notion of discrete conformal structure, generalizing the discrete …
A discrete conformality for hyperbolic polyhedral surfaces is introduced in this paper. This discrete conformality is shown to be computable. It is proved that each hyperbolic polyhedral metric on a closed surface is discrete conformal to a unique hyperbolic polyhedral metric with a given discrete curvature satisfying Gauss-Bonnet formula. Furthermore, the hyperbolic polyhedral metric with given curvature can be obtained using a discrete Yamabe flow with surgery. In particular, each hyperbolic polyhedral metric on a closed surface with negative Euler characteristic is discrete conformal to a u…
Biconformal deformations take place in the presence of a conformal foliation, deforming by different factors tangent to and orthogonal to the foliation. Four-manifolds endowed with a conformal foliation by surfaces present a natural context to put into effect this process. We develop the tools to calculate the transformation of the Ricci curvature under such deformations and apply our method to construct Einstein $4$-manifolds. One particular family of examples have ends that collapse asymptotically to ${\mathbb R}^2$.
In 1992, motivated by Riemann mapping theorem, Escobar considered a version of Yamabe problem on manifolds of dimension n greater than 2 with boundary. The problem consists in finding a conformal metric such that the scalar curvature is zero and the mean curvature is constant on the boundary. By using a local test function construction, we are able to seattle the most cases left by Escobar's and Marques's works. Moreover, we reduce the remaining case to the positive mass theorem. In this proof, we use the method developed in previous works by Brendle and by Brendle and the author.
The (Fefferman-Graham) ambient obstruction tensor is a conformally invariant symmetric trace-free 2-tensor on even-dimensional Riemannian and pseudo-Riemannian manifolds. The conformal deformation complex is a differential complex related to infinitesimal deformations of conformal structure. We construct a conformally invariant differential operator on algebraic Weyl tensors that gives special curved analogues of certain operators related to the deformation complex and that, upon application to the Weyl curvature, yields the obstruction tensor. This new definition of the obstruction tensor lea…
Registration, which aims to find an optimal one-to-one correspondence between different data, is an important problem in various fields. This problem is especially challenging when large deformations occur. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm to obtain diffeomorphic image or surface registrations with large deformations via quasi-conformal maps. The basic idea is to minimize an energy functional involving a Beltrami coefficient term, which measures the distortion of the quasi-conformal map. The Beltrami coefficient effectively controls the bijectivity and smoothness of the registration…
The conformal geometry of the Schwarzian Davey-Stewartson II hierarchy and its discrete analogue is investigated. Connections with discrete and continuous isothermic surfaces and generalised Clifford configurations are recorded. An interpretation of the Schwarzian Davey-Stewartson II flows as integrable deformations of conformally immersed surfaces is given.
By Liouville's theorem, in dimensions 3 or more conformal transformations form a finite-dimensional group, an apparent drastic departure from the 2-dimensional case. We propose a derived enhancement of the conformal Lie algebra which is an infinite-dimensional dg-Lie algebra incorporating not only symmetries but also deformations of the conformal structure. Our approach is based on (derived) deformation theory of the ambitwistor space of complex null-geodesics.
In this paper, we consider the discrete deformation of the discrete space curves with constant torsion described by the discrete mKdV or the discrete sine-Gordon equations, and show that it is formulated as the torsion-preserving equidistant deformation on the osculating plane which satisfies the isoperimetric condition. The curve is reconstructed from the deformation data by using the Sym-Tafel formula. The isoperimetric equidistant deformation of the space curves does not preserve the torsion in general. However, it is possible to construct the torsion-preserving deformation by tuning the de…
The conformal method is a technique for finding Cauchy data in general relativity solving the Einstein constraint equations, and its parameters include a conformal class, a conformal momentum (as measured by a densitized lapse), and a mean curvature. Although the conformal method is successful in generating constant mean curvature (CMC) solutions of the constraint equations, it is unknown how well it applies in the non-CMC setting, and there have been indications that it encounters difficulties there. We are therefore motivated to investigate alternative generalizations of the CMC conformal me…
We establish a connection between recent developments in the study of vortices in the abelian Higgs models, and in the theory of structure-preserving discrete conformal maps. We explain how both are related via conformal mapping problems involving prescribed linear combinations of the curvature and volume form, and show how the discrete conformal theory can be used to construct discrete vortex solutions.
Let $(M,g)$ be a compact connected orientable Riemannian manifold of dimension $n\ge4$ and let $λ_{k,p} (g)$ be the $k$-th positive eigenvalue of the Laplacian $Δ_{g,p}=dd^*+d^*d$ acting on differential forms of degree $p$ on $M$. We prove that the metric $g$ can be conformally deformed to a metric $g'$, having the same volume as $g$, with arbitrarily large $λ_{1,p} (g')$ for all $p\in[2,n-2]$. Note that for the other values of $p$, that is $p=0, 1, n-1$ and $n$, one can deduce from the literature that, $\forall k >0$, the $k$-th eigenvalue $λ_{k,p}$ is uniformly bounded on any conformal class…
We give sufficient and "almost" necessary conditions for the prescribed scalar curvature problems within the conformal class of a Riemannian metric $ g $ for both closed manifolds and compact manifolds with boundary, including the interesting cases $ \mathbb{S}^{n} $ or some quotient of $ \mathbb{S}^{n} $, in dimensions $ n \geqslant 3 $, provided that the first eigenvalues of conformal Laplacian (with appropriate boundary conditions if necessary) are positive. When the manifold is not some quotient of $ \mathbb{S}^{n} $, we show that, on one hand, any smooth function that is a positive consta…
