Canonical metrics in complex geometry

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). The PI's proposed research is concerned with the study of canonical Kahler metrics on algebraic varieties. There are deep conjectures relating the existence of extremal metrics to stability of the underlying algebraic variety and understanding this relationship has been studied intensively in the last decade. One major aspect of the PI's research is what one can say when no extremal metric exists. This problem will be studied both on the algebraic side to understand how varieties can be destabilized, and also in terms of metrics, which involves extending many of the existing results on extremal metrics to non-compact manifolds with cusp-like singularities along divisors.Another direction in the PI's proposal is the use of geometric flows to attack the existence of canonical metrics. Here too one of the most fascinating aspects is to study what kinds of singularities can form when no extremal metric exists and the PI will build on his earlier work on the Calabi flow on ruled surfaces and toric varieties and on the Kahler-Ricci flow.Geometric partial differential equations govern much of the physical world. For example solutions of Einstein's equations are intimately related to our understanding of the universe. The proposed research studies differential equations related to Einstein's equations and the key question is how the global structure of a space influences the local, analytic properties of the solutions of such equations.Understanding this phenomenon will have applications in physics and the sciences in general.