In this paper, we illustrate the wave character of the metrics and curvatures of manifolds and introduce a new understanding toolthe hyperbolic geometric flow. This kind of flow is new and very natural to understand certain wave phenomena in the nature as well as the geometry of manifolds. It possesses many interesting properties from both mathematics and physics. Several applications of this method have been found.

We study the limit of quasilocal mass defined in [4] and [5] for a family of spacelike 2-surfaces in spacetime. In particular, we show the limit coincides with the ADM mass at spatial infinity. The limit for coordinate spheres of a boosted slice of the Schwarzchild solution is computed explicitly and shown to give the expected energymomentum four-vector

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.

We prove that the higher harmonic signature of an even dimensional oriented Riemannian foliation F of a compact Riemannian manifold M with coefficients in a leafwise U(p, q)-flat complex bundle is a leafwise homotopy invariant. We also prove the leafwise homotopy invariance of the twisted higher Betti classes. Consequences for the Novikov conjecture for foliations and for groups are investigated.

The Wess-Zumino-Witten term was first introduced in the low energy σ-model which describes pions, the Goldstone bosons for the broken flavor symmetry in quantum chromodynamics. We introduce a new definition of this term in arbitrary gravitational backgrounds. It matches several features of the fundamental gauge theory, including the presence of fermionic states and the anomaly of the flavor symmetry. To achieve this matching, we use a certain generalized differential cohomology theory. We also prove a formula for the determinant line bundle of special families of Dirac operators on 4-manifolds in terms of this cohomology theory. One consequence is that there are no global anomalies in the Standard Model (in arbitrary gravitational backgrounds).