| Summary: | <p>We study the Laplacian flow and coflow on contact Calabi–Yau 7-manifolds. We show that the natural initial condition leads to an ancient solution of the Laplacian flow with a finite time Type I singularity which is not a soliton, whereas it produces an immortal (though neither eternal nor self-similar) solution of the Laplacian coflow which has an infinite time singularity of Type IIb, unless the transverse Calabi–Yau geometry is flat. The flows in each case collapse (under normalised volume) to a lower-dimensional limit, which is either ℝ, for the Laplacian flow, or standard ℂ<sup>3</sup> for the Laplacian coflow. We also study the Hitchin flow in this setting, which we show coincides with the Laplacian coflow, up to reparametrisation of time, and defines an (incomplete) Calabi–Yau structure on the spacetime track of the flow.</p>
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