Flows with surgery revisited

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a new method to establish existence of geometric flows with surgery. In contrast to all prior constructions of flows with surgery in the literature our new approach does not require any a priori estimates in the smooth setting. Instead, our approach is based on a hybrid compactness theorem, which takes smooth limits near the surgery regions but weak limits in all other regions. For concreteness, here we develop our new method in the classical setting of mean-convex surfaces in $\mathbb{R}^3$, thus giving a new proof of the existence results due to Brendle-Huisken and Haslhofer-Kleiner. Other settings, including in particular free boundary surfaces, will be addressed in subsequent work.