Combinatorial Calabi flows for ideal circle patterns in spherical background geometry

Abstract

Combinatorial Calabi flows are introduced by Ge in his Ph.D. thesis (Combinatorial methods and geometric equations, Peking University, Beijing, 2012), and have been studied extensively in Euclidean and hyperbolic background geometry. In this paper, we introduce the combinatorial Calabi flow in spherical background geometry for finding ideal circle patterns with prescribed total geodesic curvatures. We prove that the solution of combinatorial Calabi flow exists for all time and converges if and only if there exists an ideal circle pattern with prescribed total geodesic curvatures. We also show that if it converges, it will converge exponentially fast to the desired metric, which provides an effective algorithm to find certain ideal circle patterns. To our knowledge, it is the first combinatorial Calabi flow in spherical background geometry.