UBC DG + MP + PDE Seminar: Xiangwen Zhang

Geometric flows have been proven to be powerful tools in the study of many important problems arising from both geometry and theoretical physics. Aiming to study the equations from the flux compactifications of Type IIA superstrings, we introduce the so-called Type IIA flow, which is a flow of closed and primitive 3-forms on a symplectic Calabi-Yau 6-manifold. Remarkably, the Type IIA flow can also be viewed as a flow as a coupling of the Ricci flow with a scalar field. In this talk, we will discuss the progress on this flow.