In this note, we study submanifold geometry of the Atiyah--Hitchin manifold, a double cover of the 2-monopole moduli space, which plays an important role in various settings such as the supersymmetric background of string theory. When the manifold is naturally identified as the total space of a line bundle over S^2, the zero section is a distinguished minimal 2-sphere of considerable interest. In particular, there has been a conjecture about the uniqueness of this minimal 2-sphere among all closed minimal 2-surfaces. We show that this minimal 2-sphere satisfies the ``strong stability condition" proposed in our earlier work, and confirm the global uniqueness as a corollary.

We establish the global existence and uniqueness of classical solutions to the Cauchy problem for the isentropic compressible Navier-Stokes equations in three spatial dimensions with smooth initial data that are of small energy but possibly large oscillations with constant state as far field, which could be either vacuum or nonvacuum. The initial density is allowed to vanish, and the spatial measure of the set of vacuum can be arbitrarily large; in particular, the initial density can even have compact support. These results generalize previous results on classical solutions for initial densities being strictly away from vacuum and are the first for global classical solutions that may have large oscillations and can contain vacuum states. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc

We obtain sharp integral potential bounds for gradients of solutions to a wide class of quasilinear elliptic equations with measure data. Our estimates are global over bounded domains that satisfy a mild exterior capacitary density condition. They are obtained in Lorentz spaces whose degrees of integrability lie below or near the natural exponent of the operator involved. As a consequence, nonlinear Calderón–Zygmund type estimates below the natural exponent are also obtained for $\mathcal{A}$ -superharmonic functions in the whole space ℝ^{$n$}. This answers a question raised in our earlier work (On Calderón–Zygmund theory for$p$- and $\mathcal{A}$ -superharmonic functions, to appear in$Calc. Var. Partial Differential Equations$, DOI10.1007/s00526-011-0478-8) and thus greatly improves the result there.

In a recent important breakthrough D. Christodoulou has solved a long standing problem of General Relativity of evolutionary formation of trapped surfaces in the Einstein-vacuum space-times. He has identified an open set of regular initial conditions on an outgoing null hypersurface (both finite and at past null infinity) leading to a formation a trapped surface in the corresponding vacuum space-time to the future of the initial outgoing hypersurface and another incoming null hypersurface with the prescribed Minkowskian data. In this paper we give a simpler proof for a finite problem by enlarging the admissible set of initial conditions and, consistent with this, relaxing the corresponding propagation estimates just enough that a trapped surface still forms. We also reduce the number of derivatives needed in the argument from two derivatives of the curvature to just one. More importantly, the proof, which can be easily localized with respect to angular sectors, has the potential for further developments.

In this paper, we derive estimates for scalar curvature type equations with more singular right hand side. As an application, we prove Donaldson's conjecture on the equivalence between geodesic stability and existence of cscK when $Aut_0(M,J)\neq0$. Moreover, we show that when $Aut_0(M,J)\neq0$, the properness of $K$-energy with respect to a suitably defined distance implies the existence of cscK.