We construct balanced metrics on the family of non-Khler Calabi-Yau threefolds that are obtained by smoothing after contracting ( 1, 1) -rational curves on a Khler Calabi-Yau threefold. As an application, we construct balanced metrics on complex manifolds diffeomorphic to the connected sum of ( 1, 1) copies of ( 1, 1) .

This is the second in a series of papers on a new equivariant cohomology that takes values in a vertex algebra. In an earlier paper, the first two authors gave a construction of the cohomology functor on the category of O(sg) algebras. The new cohomology theory can be viewed as a kind of "chiralization'' of the classical equivariant cohomology, the latter being defined on the category of $G^*$ algebras a la H. Cartan. In this paper, we further develop the chiral theory by first extending it to allow a much larger class of algebras which we call sg[t] algebras. In the geometrical setting, our principal example of an O(sg) algebra is the chiral de Rham complex Q(M) of a G manifold M. There is an interesting subalgebra of Q(M) which does not admit a full O(sg) algebra structure but retains the structure of an sg[t] algebra, enough for us to define its chiral equivariant cohomology. The latter then turns out to have many surprising features that allows us to delineate a number of interesting geometric aspects of the G manifold M, sometimes in ways that are quite different from the classical theory.

We discuss a sharp lower bound for the first positive eigenvalue of the sublaplacian on a closed, strictly pseudoconvex pseudohermitian manifold of dimension 2m + 1 ≥ 5. We prove that the equality holds iff the manifold is equivalent to the CR sphere up to a scaling. For this purpose, we establish an Obata-type theorem in CR geometry that characterizes the CR sphere in terms of a nonzero function satisfying a certain overdetermined system. Similar results are proved in dimension 3 under an additional condition.

We study the properties of the n-volumic scalar curvature in this note. Lott-Sturm-Villani's curvature-dimension condition CD(κ,n) was showed to imply Gromov's n-volumic scalar curvature ≥nκ under an additional n-dimensional condition and we show the stability of n-volumic scalar curvature ≥κ with respect to smGH-convergence. Then we propose a new weighted scalar curvature on the weighted Riemannian manifold and show its properties.

Quasilocal mass in general relativity is a notion defined for a closed space like 2-surface in spacetime. In this note, we explain the definition in [23] and [24] from a mathematical viewpoint, emphasizing the connection to differential geometry and nonlinear partial differential equations. We also discuss a minimax interpretation of the definition and compare with other notions of quasilocal mass.