Recently Freed and Hopkins [11] proved that there is no parity anomaly in M-theory on pin+ manifolds in the low-energy field theory approximation, and they also developed an algebraic theory of cubic forms. Earlier Witten [33] proved the anomaly cancellation for spin manifolds by introducing the E8-bundle technique. Motivated by the cubic forms and the anomaly cancellation formulas of Witten-Freed-Hopkins, we give some new cubic forms on spin, spinc, spinω2 and orientable 12- manifolds respectively. We relate them to η-invariants when the manifolds are with boundary, and mod 2 indices on 10 dimensional characteristic submanifolds when the manifolds are spinc or spinω2 . Our method of producing these cubic forms is a combination of (generalized) Witten classes and the character of the basic representation of affine E8.

We prove that given a three manifold with an arbitrary metric $(M^3, g)$ of positive Ricci curvature, there exists a sweepout of $M$ by surfaces of genus $\leq 3$ and areas bounded by $C vol(M^3, g)^{2/3}$. We use this result to construct a sweepout of $M$ by 1-cycles of length at most $C vol(M^3, g)^{1/3}$ and prove a systolic inequality for all $M \neq S^3$. The sweepout of surfaces is generated from a min-max minimal surface. If further assuming a positive scalar curvature lower bound, we can get a diameter upper bound for the min-max surface.

By using certain idea developed in minimal submanifold theory we study rigidity problem for self-shrinkers in the present paper. We prove rigidity results for the squared norm of the second fundamental form of self-shrinkers, either under point-wise conditions or under integral conditions.

This paper mainly focuses on the CR analogue of the three-circle theorem in a complete noncompact pseudohermitian manifold of vanishing torsion being odd dimensional counterpart of Kaehler geometry. In this paper, we show that the CR three-circle theorem holds if its pseudohermitian sectional curvature is nonnegative. As an application, we confirm the first CR Yau uniformization conjecture and obtain the CR analogue of the sharp dimension estimate for CR holomorphic functions of polynomial growth and its rigidity when the pseudohermitian sectional curvature is nonnegative. This is also the first step toward second and third CR Yauís uniformization conjecture. Moreover, in the course of the proof of the CR three-circle theorem, we derive CR sub-Laplacian comparison theorem. Then Liouville theorem holds for positive pseudoharmonic functions in a complete noncompact pseudohermitian (2n + 1)-manifold of vanishing torsion and nonnegative pseudohermitian Ricci curvature.

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