Weak and smooth solutions for a fractional Yamabe flow: the case of general compact and locally conformally flat manifolds

Abstract: As a counterpart of the classical Yamabe problem, a fractional Yamabe flow has been introduced by Jin and Xiong (2014) on the sphere. Here we pursue its study in the context of general compact smooth manifolds with positive fractional curvature. First, we prove that the flow is locally well posed in the weak sense on any compact manifold. If the manifold is locally conformally flat with positive Yamabe invariant, we also prove that the flow is smooth and converges to a constant scalar curvature metric. We provide different proofs using extension properties introduced by Chang and Gonz\'alez (2011) for the conformally covariant fractional order operators.