Cobordism, Singularities and the Ricci Flow Conjecture

Abstract: In the following work, an attempt to conciliate the Ricci flow conjecture and the Cobordism conjecture, stated as refinements of the Swampland distance conjecture and of the No global symmetries conjecture respectively, is presented. This is done by starting from a suitable manifold with trivial cobordism class, applying surgery techniques to Ricci flow singularities and trivialising the cobordism class of one of the resulting connected components via the introduction of appropriate defects. The specific example of $\Omega^{SO}_4$ is studied in detail. A connection between the process of blowing up a point of a manifold and that of taking the connected sum of such with $\mathbb{CP}^n$ is explored. Hence, the problem of studying the Ricci flow of a $K3$ whose cobordism class is trivialised by the addition of $16$ copies of $\mathbb{CP}^2$ is tackled by applying both the techniques developed in the previous sections and the classification of singularities in terms of ADE groups.