Motivated by the study of collapsing Calabi–Yau 3-folds with a Lefschetz K3 fibration, we construct a complete Calabi–Yau metric on C3 with maximal volume growth, which in the appropriate scale is expected to model the collapsing metric near the nodal point. This new Calabi–Yau metric has singular tangent cone at infinity C2/Z2×C, and its Riemannian geometry has certain non-standard features near the singularity of the tangent cone, which are more typical of adiabatic limit problems. The proof uses an existence result in H-J. Hein’s Ph.D. thesis to perturb an asymptotic approximate solution into an actual solution, and the main difficulty lies in correcting the slowly decaying error terms.

In the first paper of this series, “Electrodynamics and the Gauss Linking Integral on the 3-sphere and in Hyperbolic 3-space,” we developed a steady-state version of classical electrodynamics in these two spaces, including explicit formulas for the vector-valued Green’s operator, explicit formulas of Biot-Savart type for the magnetic field, and a corresponding Amp`ere’s Law contained in Maxwell’s equations, and then used these to obtain explicit inte- gral formulas for the linking number of two disjoint closed curves. In this second paper, we obtain integral formulas for twisting, writhing, and helicity, and prove that link = twist + writhe on the 3-sphere and in hyperbolic 3-space. We then use these results to derive upper bounds for the helicity of vector fields and lower bounds for the first eigenvalue of the curl operator on subdomains of these two spaces. An announcement of these results, and a hint of their proofs, can be found in the Math ArXiv, math.GT/0406276, while an expanded version of the first paper, with full proofs, can be found at math.GT/0510388.

In relativity, the energy of a moving particle depends on the observer, and the rest mass is the minimal energy seen among all observers. The Wang–Yau quasi-local mass for a surface in spacetime introduced in Wang and Yau (Phys Rev Lett 102(2):021101, 2009 ; Commun Math Phys 288(3):919–942, 2009) is defined by minimizing quasi-local energy associated with admissible isometric embeddings of the surface into the Minkowski space. A critical point of the quasi-local energy is an isometric embedding satisfying the Euler–Lagrange equation. In this article, we prove results regarding both local and global minimizing properties of critical points of the Wang–Yau quasi-local energy. In particular, under a condition on the mean curvature vector we show a critical point minimizes the quasi-local energy locally. The same condition also implies that the critical point is globally minimizing among all axially symmetric embedding provided the image of the associated isometric embedding lies in a totally geodesic Euclidean 3-space.

We develop some results from [4] on the positivity of direct image bundles in the particular case of a trivial ¯bration over a one-dimensional base. We also apply the results to study variations of KÄahler metrics.

Let U be a connected non-singular quasi-projective variety and f : A → U a family of abelian varieties of dimension g. Suppose that the induced map U → Ag is generically finite and there is a compactification Y with complement S = Y \U a normal crossing divisor such that Ω1 Y (log S) is nef and ωY (S) is ample with respect to U. We characterize whether U is a Shimura variety by numerical data attached to the variation of Hodge structures, rather than by properties of the map U →Ag or by the existence of CM points. More precisely, we show that f : A → U is a Kuga fibre space, if and only if two conditions hold. First, each irreducible local subsystem V of R1f∗CA is either unitary or satisfies the Arakelov equality. Second, for each factor M in the universal cover of U whose tangent bundle behaves like that of a complex ball, an iterated Kodaira-Spencer map associated with V has minimal possible length in the direction of M. If in addition f : A → U is rigid, it is a connected Shimura subvariety of Ag of Hodge type.