The Ricci flow approach to homogeneous Einstein metrics on flag manifolds

We give a global picture of the normalized Ricci flow on generalized flag manifolds with two or three isotropy summands. The normalized Ricci flow for these spaces reduces to a parameter-dependent system of two or three ordinary differential equations, respectively. Here, we present a qualitative study of these systems’ global phase portrait, which uses techniques of dynamical systems theory. This study allows us to draw conclusions about the existence and the analytical form of invariant Einstein metrics on such manifolds and seems to offer a better insight to the classification problem of invariant Einstein metrics on compact homogeneous spaces.