Remarks on Hamilton's Compactness Theorem for Ricci flow

Abstract: A fundamental tool in the analysis of Ricci flow is a compactness result of Hamilton in the spirit of the work of Cheeger, Gromov and others. Roughly speaking it allows one to take a sequence of Ricci flows with uniformly bounded curvature and uniformly controlled injectivity radius, and extract a subsequence that converges to a complete limiting Ricci flow. A widely quoted extension of this result allows the curvature to be bounded uniformly only in a local sense. However, in this note we give a counterexample.