Global dynamics of the Ricci flow on flag manifolds with three isotropy summands.

We provide a complete description of the homogeneous Ricci flow of invariant metrics on flag manifolds with 3 isotropy summands: phase portraits, basins of attractions, conjugation classes and collapsing phenomena. Previous work only provided partial pictures. The result is obtained by using a dynamical approach that considerably simplifies the problem. It consists on a rescaling and a time-reparametrization of the dynamical system, transforming it into polynomial equations on a 2-dimensional simplex. Then techniques from planar dynamical systems and Lie theory are used to proceed case by case, analyzing the phase portrait of each class of flag manifolds with three isotropy summands. Such manifolds are divided in two infinite classical families and eight exceptional cases. In order to classify the limits of the related dynamical systems, we characterize arbitrary Gromov-Hausdorff limits of sequences of homogeneous metrics on a fixed homogeneous manifold. In particular, we show that the generic limit is an explicit Finsler manifold.