Let T  (Y, ) be a transverse knot which is the binding of some open book, (T, ), for the ambient contact manifold (Y, ). In this paper, we show that the transverse invariant bT(T ) 2[HFK(−Y,K), defined in [LOSSz09], is nonvanishing for such transverse knots. This is true regardless of whether or not  is tight. We also prove a vanishing theorem for the invariants L and T. As a corollary, we show that if (T, ) is an open book with connected binding, then the complement of T has no Giroux torsion.

Given a hyperbolic surface with geodesic boundary S, the lengths of a maximal system of disjoint simple geodesic arcs on S that start and end at @S perpendicularly are coordinates on the Teichm¨uller space T (S). We express the Weil-Petersson Poisson structure of T (S) in this system of coordinates, and we prove that it limits pointwise to the piecewise-linear Poisson structure defined by Kontsevich on the arc complex of S. At the same time, we obtain a formula for the first-order variation of the distance between two closed geodesics under Fenchel-Nielsen deformation.

A well-known result on pseudodifferential operators states that the noncommutative residue (Wodzicki residue) of a zero-order pseudodifferential projection on a closed manifold vanishes. This statement is non-local and implies the regularity of the eta invariant at zero of Dirac type operators. We prove that in the odd dimensional case an analogous statement holds for the algebra of projective pseudodifferential operators, i.e., the noncommutative residue of a projective pseudodifferential projection vanishes. Our strategy of proof also simplifies the argument in the classical setting. We show that the noncommutative residue factors to a map from the twisted K-theory of the co-sphere bundle and then use arguments from twisted K-theory to reduce this question to a known model case. It can then be verified by local computations that this map vanishes in odd dimensions.

We show that it is possible to perturb arbitrary vacuum asymptotically flat spacetimes to new ones having exactly the same energy and linear momentum, but with center of mass and angular momentum equal to any preassigned values measured with respect to a fixed affine frame at infinity. This is in contrast to the axisymmetric situation where a bound on the angular momentum by the mass has been shown to hold for black hole solutions. Our construction involves changing the solution at the linear level in a shell near infinity, and perturbing to impose the vacuum constraint equations. The procedure involves the perturbation correction of an approximate solution which is given explicitly.

We give a new proof of a classical uniqueness theorem of Alexandrov [4] using the weak uniqueness continuation theorem of BersNirenberg [8]. We prove a version of this theorem with the minimal regularity assumption: the spherical Hessians of the corresponding convex bodies as Radon measures are nonsingular.