We show that the interior of the convex core of a quasifuchsian punctured-torus group admits an ideal decomposition (usually an infinite triangulation) which is canonical in two very different senses: in a combinatorial sense via the pleating invariants, and in a geometric sense via an Epstein-Penner convex hull construction in Minkowski space. This result re-proves the Pleating Lamination Theorem for quasifuchsian punctured-torus groups, and extends to all punctured-torus groups if a strong version of the Pleating Lamination Conjecture is true.

Let F be a foliation in a closed 3-manifold with negatively curved fundamental group and suppose that F is almost trans- verse to a quasigeodesic pseudo-Anosov °ow. We show that the leaves of the foliation in the universal cover extend continuously to the sphere at in¯nity; therefore the limit sets of the leaves are continuous images of the circle. One important corollary is that if F is a Reebless, ¯nite depth foliation in a hyperbolic 3-manifold, then it has the continuous extension property. Such ¯nite depth foliations exist whenever the second Betti number is non zero. The result also applies to other classes of foliations, including a large class of foliations where all leaves are dense, and in¯nitely many examples with one sided branching. One extremely useful tool is a detailed understanding of the topological structure and asymptotic properties of the 1-dimensional foliations in the leaves of e F induced by the stable and unstable foliations of the °ow.

On a K-unstable toric variety we show the existence of an optimal destabilising convex function. We show that if this is piecewise linear then it gives rise to a decomposition into semistable pieces analogous to the Harder-Narasimhan filtration of an unstable vector bundle. We also show that if the Calabi flow exists for all time on a toric variety then it minimizes the Calabi functional. In this case the infimum of the Calabi functional is given by the supremum of the normalized Futaki invariants over all destabilising test-configurations, as predicted by a conjecture of Donaldson.

A horospherical torus about a cusp of a hyperbolic manifold inherits a Euclidean similarity structure, called a cusp shape. We bound the change in cusp shape when the hyperbolic structure of the manifold is deformed via cone deformation preserving the cusp. The bounds are in terms of the change in structure in a neighborhood of the singular locus alone. We then apply this result to provide information on the cusp shape of many hyperbolic knots, given only a diagram of the knot. Specifically, we show there is a universal constant C such that if a knot admits a prime, twist reduced diagram with at least C crossings per twist region, then the length of the second shortest curve on the cusp torus is bounded. The bound is linear in the number of twist regions of the diagram.

We prove higher regularity properties of inverse mean curvature flow in Euclidean space: A sharp lower bound for the mean curvature is derived for star-shaped surfaces, independently of the initial mean curvature. It is also shown that solutions to the inverse mean curvature flow are smooth if the mean curvature is bounded from below. As a consequence we show that weak solutions of the inverse mean curvature flow are smooth for large times,beginning from the first time where a surface in the evolution is star-shaped.

We show that the notion of hyperconvex representation due to F. Labourie gives a geometric characterization of the representations of a surface group in PSLn(R) that belong to the Hitchin component.

For a smooth projective toric surface we determine the Donaldson invariants and their wallcrossing in terms of the Nekrasov partition function. Using the solution of the Nekrasov conjecture [33, 38, 3] and its refinement [34], we apply this result to give a generating function for the wallcrossing of Donaldson invariants of good walls of simply connected projective surfaces with b+ = 1 in terms of modular forms. This formula was proved earlier in [19] more generally for simply connected 4-manifolds with b+ = 1, as- suming the Kotschick-Morgan conjecture, and it was also derived by physical arguments in [31].

The actions of a half Virasoro algebra have appeared in many integrable systems. In this paper we show that there is an action of a (Half) Virasoro algebra on the space of (2+0) harmonic maps into a Lie group. This action is generated by a natural action on the frames. A similar calculation on the space-time (1+1) harmonic maps yields formulas generated by John Schwarz.

Let X be a compact complex, not necessarily K¨ahler, manifold of dimension n. We characterize the volume of any holomorphic line bundle L → X as the supremum R of the Monge-Amp`ere masses X Tn ac over all closed positive currents T in the first Chern class of L, where Tac is the absolutely continuous part of T in its Lebesgue decomposition. This result, new in the non-K¨ahler context, can be seen as holomorphic Morse inequalities for the cohomology of high tensor powers of line bundles endowed with arbitrarily singular Hermitian metrics. It gives, in particular, a new bigness criterion for line bundles in terms of existence of singular Hermitian metrics satisfying positivity conditions. The proof is based on the construction of a new regularization for closed (1, 1)-currents with a control of the Monge-Amp`ere masses of the approximating sequence. To this end, we prove a potential-theoretic result in one complex variable and study the growth of multiplier ideal sheaves associated with increasingly singular metrics.

For stratified Mukai flops of type An,k,D2k+1 and E6,I , it is shown that the fiber product induces isomorphisms on Chow motives. In contrast to (standard) Mukai flops, the cup product is generally not preserved. For An,2, D5 and E6,I flops, quantum corrections are found through degeneration/deformation to ordinary flops.