Improved explicit estimates for the discrete Laplace operator with hyperbolic circle patterns

Abstract

Ge in his thesis \cite{Ge-thesis} introduced the combinatorial Calabi flows and established the long time existence and convergence of solutions to the flows in both hyperbolic and Euclidean background geometries. It is noteworthy that the existence of solutions to the combinatorial Calabi flows in hyperbolic background geometry proves to be more intricate and challenging compared to the Euclidean background geometry. The main difficulty is to establish the compactness, especially the lower boundeness along the flow equations. In this paper, we give two explicit estimates for the discrete Laplace operator based on the Glickenstein-Thomas formulation \cite{Glickenstein2017} for discrete hyperbolic conformal structures. As applications, we give new proofs of the long time existence of solutions to the combinatorial Calabi flows established by Ge-Xu \cite{Ge2016}, Ge-Hua \cite{Ge2018} and the combinatorial $p$-th Calabi flows established by Lin-Zhang \cite{Lin2019} in hyperbolic background geometry.