A steady length function for Ricci flows

A fundamental step in the analysis of singularities of Ricci flow was the discovery by Perelman of a monotonic volume quantity which detected shrinking solitons. A similar quantity was found by Feldman, Ilmanen, and Ni [J. Geom. Anal. 15 (2005), pp. 49-62] which detected expanding solitons. The current work introduces a modified length functional as a first step towards a steady soliton monotonicity formula. This length functional generates a distance function in the usual way which is shown to satisfy several differential inequalities which saturate precisely on manifolds satisfying a modification of the steady soliton equation.