A mass-decreasing flow in dimension three

Abstract: In this article, we introduce a mass-decreasing flow for asymptotically flat three-manifolds with nonnegative scalar curvature. This flow is defined by iterating a suitable Ricci flow with surgery and conformal rescalings and has a number of nice properties. In particular, wormholes pinch off and nontrivial spherical space forms bubble off in finite time. Moreover, a noncompact variant of the Perelman-energy is monotone along the flow. Assuming a certain inequality between the mass and this Perelman-energy a priori, we can prove that the flow squeezes out all the initial mass.