We introduce singular Ricci flows, which are Ricci flow spacetimes subject to certain asymptotic conditions. These provide a solution to the long-standing problem of finding a good notion of Ricci flow through singularities, in the 3-dimensional case. We prove that Ricci flow with surgery, starting from a fixed initial condition, subconverges to a singular Ricci flow as the surgery parameter tends to zero. We establish a number of geometric and analytical properties of singular Ricci flows.

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.

In this paper, we establish a Bochner-type formula on Alexandrov spaces with Ricci curvature bounded below. Yau’s gradient estimate for harmonic functions is also obtained on Alexandrov spaces.

We determine all helix surfaces with parallel mean curvature vector field which are not minimal or pseudo-umbilical in spaces of type $M^{n}(c)\times\mathbb{R}$ , where$M$^{$n$}($c$) is a simply connected$n$-dimensional manifold with constant sectional curvature$c$.

We establish an interior C 2 estimate for k+ 1 convex solutions to Dirichlet problems of k-Hessian equations. We also use such estimate to obtain a rigidity theorem for k+ 1 convex entire solutions of k-Hessian equations in Euclidean space.