Ancient solutions of the homogeneous Ricci flow on flag manifolds

For any flag manifold $M=G/K$ of a compact simple Lie group $G$ we describe non-collapsing ancient invariant solutions of the homogeneous unnormalized Ricci flow. Such solutions pass through an invariant Einstein metric on $M$, and by a result of Bohm-Lafuente-Simon ([BoLS17]) they must develop a Type I singularity in their extinction finite time, and also to the past. To illustrate the situation we engage ourselves with the global study of the dynamical system induced by the unnormalized Ricci flow on any flag manifold $M=G/K$ with second Betti number $b_{2}(M)=1$, for a generic initial invariant metric. We describe the corresponding dynamical systems and present non-collapsed ancient solutions, whose $\alpha$-limit set consists of fixed points at infinity of $\mathscr{M}^G$. We show that these fixed points correspond to invariant Einstein metrics and based on the Poincare compactification method, we study their stability properties, illuminating thus the structure of the system's phase space.