Modified mean curvature flow and CMC foliation conjecture in almost Fuchsian manifolds

Abstract: For a long time, there has been a folklore conjecture, often attributed to Thurston, which asserts that every almost Fuchsian manifold is foliated by closed incompressible constant mean curvature (CMC) surfaces. In this talk I will discuss our recent work using the modified mean curvature flow to prove the existence of closed incompressible surfaces of constant mean curvature in a certain class of almost Fuchsian manifolds. As an application, we confirm this CMC foliation conjecture for such a class of almost Fuchsian manifolds. This is joint work with Zheng Huang and Zhou Zhang.