We apply various topological methods to distinguish connected components of moduli spaces of complete Riemannian metrics of nonnegative sectional curvature on open manifolds. The new geometric ingredient is that souls of nearby nonnegatively curved metrics are ambiently isotopic.

In this paper, we build properly embedded singly periodic minimal surfaces which have infinite total curvature in the quotient by their period. These surfaces are constructed by adding a handle to the toroidal half-plane layers defined by H. Karcher. The technics that we use are to solve a Jenkins-Serrin problem over a strip domain and to consider the conjugate minimal surface to the graph. To construct the Jenkins Serrin graph, we solve in fact the maximal surface equation and use an other conjugation technic.

On a complete noncompact K¨ahler manifold we prove that the bottom of the spectrum for the Laplacian is bounded from above by m2 if the Ricci curvature is bounded from below by −2(m+1). Then we show that if this upper bound is achieved then either the manifold is connected at infinity or it has two ends and in this case it is diffeomorphic to the product of the real line with a compact manifold and we determine the metric.

In 1986, R. D. Cook proposed differential geometry to assess local influence of minor perturbations of statistical models. We construct a conformally invariant curvature, the conformal normal curvature, for the same purpose. This curvature provides a measure of local influence ranging from 0 to 1, with objective benchmarks to judge largeness. We study various approaches to using the conformal normal curvature and the relationships between these approaches.

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.