Biharmonic maps are maps between Riemannian manifolds which are critical points of the bi-energy. They are solutions of a system of 4thorder PDEs and they include harmonic maps and biharmonic functions as special cases. Biharmonic submanifolds (which include minimal submanifolds as special cases) are the images of biharmonic isometric immersions. The talk will review some problems, including classification of biharmonic submanifolds in space forms, biharmonic maps into spheres, biharmonic conformal maps, and unique continuation theorems, studied in this field and their progress since 2000. The talk also presents some recent work on equivariant biharmonic maps and the stability and index of biharmonic hypersurfaces in space forms.
In this talk, we will present some recent study about the index
problem of longitudinal elliptic operators on open foliated manifolds. As
the operators under consideration are not elliptic on the whole (not
necessarily closed) manifold, they in general fail to be Fredholm. We will
introduce some operator algebra tools to study the index of such operators.
As an application, we will present a Lichnerowicz type vanishing result for
foliations on open manifolds.
Let (X,L) be a polarized manifold. Assume that the automorphism group is finite. If the height discrepancy of (X,L) is O(d^2) then (X,L) admits a csck metric in the first chern class of L if and only if (X,L) is asymptotically stable.
I will discuss joint work with Jason Lotay from arXiv:2002.06444. We show how the three Bryant-Salamon G2 manifolds can be viewed as coassociative fibrations. In all cases the coassociative fibres are invariant under a 3-dimensional group and are thus of cohomogeneity one, In general there are both generic smooth fibres and degenerate singular fibres. The induced Riemannian geometry on the fibres turns out to exhibit asymptotically conical and conically singular behaviour. In some cases we also explicitly determine the induced hypersymplectic structure. In all three cases we show that the "flat limits" of these coassociative fibrations are well-known calibrated fibrations of Euclidean space. Finally, we establish connections with the multimoment maps of Madsen-Swann, the new compact construction of G2 manifolds of Joyce-Karigiannis, and recent work of Donaldson involving vanishing cycles and "thimbles".
In this talk, I will discuss some known results and recent improvements to lower bound on the first eigenvalue of the p-Laplacian as well as introduce a new p-Laplace type operator acting on differential forms.
Motivated by considerations from the mirror symmetry and
Landau-Ginzburg model, we consider Witten deformation on noncompact
manifolds.
Witten deformation is a deformation of the de Rham complex introduced by
Witten in an influential paper and has had many important applications,
mostly on compact manifolds. We will discuss some recent work with my
student Junrong Yan on the spectral theory of Witten Laplacian, the
cohomology of the deformation as well as its index theory.
A joint seminar with the Geometry & Topology Seminar series.
While classical gauge theoretic invariants for 4-manifolds are usually
defined in the setting that the intersection form has nontrivial positive
part, there are several invariants for a 4-manifold X with the homology S1
cross S3. The first one is the Casson-Seiberg-Witten invariant LSW(X)
defined by Mrowka-Ruberman-Saveliev; the second one is the Fruta-Ohta
invariant LFO(X). It is conjectured that these two invariants are equal to
each other (This is an analogue of Witten’s conjecture relating Donaldson and
Seiberg-Witten invariants.)
In this talk, I will recall the definition of these two invariants, give
some applications of them (including a new obstruction for metric with
positive scalar curvature), and sketch a prove of this conjecture for
finite-order mapping tori. This is based on a joint work with Danny Ruberman
and Nikolai Saveliev.
A joint seminar with the Geometry & Topology Seminar series.
We propose a class of local definitions of weak lower scalar curvature bounds that is well defined for C^0 metrics. We show the following: that our definitions are stable under greater-than-second-order perturbation of the metric, that there exists a reasonable notion of a Ricci flow starting from C^0 initial data which is smooth for positive times, and that the weak lower scalar curvature bounds are preserved under evolution by the Ricci flow from C^0 initial data.