In this article we show that for every finite area hyperbolic surface X of type (g,n) and any harmonic Beltrami differential μ on X , then the magnitude of μ at any point of small injectivity radius is uniform bounded from above by the ratio of the Weil–Petersson norm of μ over the square root of the systole of X up to a uniform positive constant multiplication. We apply the uniform bound above to show that the Weil–Petersson Ricci curvature, restricted at any hyperbolic surface of short systole in the moduli space, is uniformly bounded from below by the negative reciprocal of the systole up to a uniform positive constant multiplication. As an application, we show that the average total Weil–Petersson scalar curvature over the moduli space is uniformly comparable to -g as the genus g goes to infinity.

Given a compact orientable surface, we determine a complete set of relations for a function defined on the set of all homotopy classes of simple loops to be a geometric intersection number function. As a consequence, Thurston’s space of measured laminations and Thurston’s compactification of the Teichm¨uller space are described by a set of explicit equations. These equations are polynomials in the max-plus semi-ring structure on the real numbers. It shows that Thurston’s theory of measured laminations is within the domain of tropical geometry.

For a toric Calabi-Yau (CY) orbifold X whose underlying toric variety is semi-projective, we construct and study a non-toric Lagrangian torus fibration on X, which we call the Gross fibration. We apply the Strominger-Yau-Zaslow (SYZ) recipe to the Gross fibration of X to construct its mirror with the instanton corrections coming from genus 0 open orbifold Gromov-Witten (GW) invariants, which are virtual counts of holomorphic orbi-disks in X bounded by fibers of the Gross fibration. We explicitly evaluate all these invariants by first proving an open/closed equality and then employing the toric mirror theorem for suitable toric (parital) compactifications of X. Our calculations are then applied to (1) prove a conjecture of Gross-Siebert on a relation between genus 0 open orbifold GW invariants and mirror maps of X – this is called the open mirror theorem, which leads to an enumerative meaning of mirror maps, and (2) demonstrate how open (orbifold) GW invariants for toric CY orbifolds change under toric crepant resolutions – an open analogue of Ruan’s crepant resolution conjecture.

The chains studied in this paper generalize Chern–Moser chains for CR structures. They form a distinguished family of one dimensional submanifolds in manifolds endowed with a parabolic contact structure. Both the parabolic contact structure and the system of chains can be equivalently encoded as Cartan geometries (of different types). The aim of this paper is to study the relation between these two Cartan geometries for Lagrangean contact structures and partially integrable almost CR structures. We develop a general method for extending Cartan geometries which generalizes the Cartan geometry interpretation of Fefferman’s construction of a conformal structure associated to a CR structure. For the two structures in question, we show that the Cartan geometry associated to the family of chains can be obtained in that way if and only if the original parabolic contact structure is torsion free. In particular, the procedure works exactly on the subclass of (integrable) CR structures. This tight relation between the two Cartan geometries leads to an explicit description of the Cartan curvature associated to the family of chains. On the one hand, this shows that the homogeneous models for the two parabolic contact structures give rise to examples of non–flat path geometries with large automorphism groups. On the other hand, we show that one may (almost) reconstruct the underlying torsion free parabolic contact structure from the Cartan curvature associated to the chains. In particular, this leads to a very conceptual proof of the fact that chain preserving contact diffeomorphisms are either isomorphisms or antiisomorphisms of parabolic contact structures.

We study the moduli space M of torsion-free G2-structures on a fixed compact manifold M7, and define its associated universal intermediate Jacobian J . We define the Yukawa coupling and relate it to a natural pseudo-K¨ahler structure on J . We consider natural Chern–Simons-type functionals, whose critical points give associative and coassociative cycles (calibrated submanifolds coupled with Yang–Mills connections), and also deformed Donaldson–Thomas connections. We show that the moduli spaces of these structures can be isotropically immersed in J by means of G2-analogues of Abel–Jacobi maps.