Some Questions on Uniqueness and the Preservation of Structure for the Ricci Flow

This thesis explores several questions concerning the preservation of geometric structure under the Ricci flow, an evolution equation for Riemannian metrics. Within the class of complete solutions with bounded curvature, short-time existence and uniqueness of solutions guarantee that symmetries and many other geometric features are preserved along the flow. However, much less is known about the analytic and geometric properties of solutions of potentially unbounded curvature. The first part of this thesis contains a proof that the full holonomy group is preserved, up to isomorphism, forward and backward in time. The argument reduces the problem to the preservation of reduced holonomy via an analysis of the equation satisfied by parallel translation around a loop with respect to the evolving metric. The subsequent chapter examines solutions satisfying a certain instantaneous, but nonuniform, curvature bound, and shows that when such solutions split as a product initially, they will continue to split for all time. This problem is encoded as one of uniqueness for an auxiliary system constructed from a family of time-dependent, orthogonal distributions of the tangent bundle. The final section presents some details of an ongoing project concerning the uniqueness of asymptotically product gradient shrinking Ricci solitons, including the construction of a certain system of mixed differential inequalities which measures the extent to which such a soliton fails to split.