In the description of isolated gravitating systems in General Relativity a spacelike timeslice has the structure of a complete Riemannian three-manifold with an asymptotically at end. Let (N; g) denote an end of such a complete Riemannian three-manifold, ie N is diffeomorphic to R3\B1 (0), and the metric on N asymptotically approaches the Euclidean metric near infinity: gij=

We describe the counting of BPS states of Type II on K3 by relating the supersymmetric cycles of genus <i>g</i> to the number of rational curves with <i>g</i> double points on K3. The generating function for the number of such curves is the left-moving partition function of the bosonic string.

We shall consider the following Dirichlet eigenvalue problem on a smooth bounded domain S~ eRn, I where V is a nonnegative function defined on,~. As is well-known, the eigenvalues of problem (1.1) can be interpreted as the energy levels of a particle travelling under an external force field of a potential q in Rn, where and the corresponding eigenfunctions are wave functions of the Schrodinger equation-J~+ qu= lu. Furthermore, the set of eigenvalues {A,} of (1.1) are nonnegative and can be arranged in a nondecreasing order as follows, It is a significant problem to find a lower bound for~, 1 in terms of the geometry of Q. This subject has been studied extensively by many authors. A rather precise bound in the case V== 0 was worked out not only for a bounded domain in but actually valid for a general Riemannian manifold with certain curvature conditions; we refer to [4] for these recent develop-ments. Nevertheless, very little is known about the obvious interesting question of how big the gap is between 2 and l. There are both physical

The purpose of this paper is to solve a problem posed by Strominger in constructing smooth models of superstring theory with flux. These are given by non-Khler manifolds with torsion.

We describe local mirror symmetry from a mathematical point of view and make several A-model calculations using the mirror principle (localization). Our results agree with B-model computations from solutions of Picard-Fuchs differential equations constructed form the local geometry near a Fano surface within a Calabi-Yau manifold. We interpret the Gromov-Witten-type numbers from an enumerative point of view. We also describe the geometry of singular surfaces and show how the local invariants of singular surfaces agree with the smooth cases when they occur as complete intersections.