Quasilocal mass in general relativity is a notion defined for a closed space like 2-surface in spacetime. In this note, we explain the definition in [23] and [24] from a mathematical viewpoint, emphasizing the connection to differential geometry and nonlinear partial differential equations. We also discuss a minimax interpretation of the definition and compare with other notions of quasilocal mass.

We consider reparametrizations of Heisenberg nilflows.We show that if a Heisenberg nilflow is uniquely ergodic, all non-trivial timechanges within a dense subspace of smooth time-changes are mixing. Equivalently, in the language of special flows, we consider special flows over linear skew-shift extensions of irrational rotations of the circle. Without assuming any Diophantine condition on the frequency, we define a dense class of smooth roof functions for which the corresponding special flows are mixing whenever the roof function is not a coboundary. Mixing is produced by a mechanism known as stretching of ergodic sums. The complement of the set of mixing time-changes (or, equivalently, of mixing roof functions) has countable codimension and can be explicitly described in terms of the invariant distributions for the nilflow (or, equivalently,for the skew-shift), producing concrete examples of mixing time-changes.

This article considers the quasi-local conserved quantities with respect to a reference spacetime with a cosmological constant. We follow the approach developed by the authors in [25,26,7] and define the quasi-local energy as differences of surface Hamiltonians. The ground state for the gravitational energy is taken to be a reference configuration in the de Sitter (dS) or Anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime. This defines the quasi-local energy with respect to the reference spacetime and generalizes our previous definition with respect to the Minkowski spacetime. Through an optimal isometric embedding into the reference spacetime, the Killing fields of the reference spacetime are transplanted back to the surface in the physical spacetime to complete the definitions of quasi-local conserved quantities. We also compute how the corresponding total conserved quantities evolve under the Einstein equation with a cosmological constant.

Motivated by the study of coupled Kähler-Einstein metrics by Hultgren and Witt Nyström (2018) and coupled Kähler-Ricci solitons by Hultgren (2017), we study in this paper coupled Sasaki-Einstein metrics and coupled Sasaki-Ricci solitons. We first show an isomorphism between the Lie algebra of all transverse holomorphic vector fields and certain space of coupled basic functions related to coupled twisted Laplacians for basic functions, and obtain extensions of the well-known obstructions to the existence of Kähler-Einstein metrics to this coupled case. These results are reduced to coupled Kähler-Einstein metrics when the Sasaki structure is regular. Secondly we show the existence of toric coupled Sasaki-Einstein metrics when the basic first Chern class is positive extending the work of Hultgren (2017).

By studying modular invariance properties of some characteristic forms, we get some new anomaly cancellation formulas on (4 r 1) dimensional manifolds. As an application, we derive some results on divisibilities of the index of Toeplitz operators on (4 r 1) dimensional spin manifolds and some congruent formulas on characteristic number for (4 r 1) dimensional spin c manifolds.