In this paper we study the problem of recovering the reflecting surface in a reflector system which consists of a point light source, a reflecting surface, and an object to be illuminated. This problem involves a fully nonlinear partial differential equation of MongeAmp`ere type, subject to a nonlinear second boundary condition. A weak solution can be obtained by approximation by piecewise ellipsoidal surfaces. The regularity is a very complicated issue but we found precise conditions for it.

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.

In this paper we prove that given a point p ∈ Mn, where Mn is a closed Riemannian manifold of dimension n, the length of a shortest geodesic loop lp(Mn) at this point is bounded above by 2nd, where d is the diameter of Mn. Moreover, we show that on a closed simply connected Riemannian manifold Mn with a nontrivial second homotopy group there either exist at least three geodesic loops of length less than or equal to 2d at each point of Mn, or the length of a shortest closed geodesic on Mn is bounded from above by 4d.

Compact locally maximal hyperbolic sets are studied via geometrically defined functional spaces that take advantage of the smoothness of the map in a neighborhood of the hyperbolic set. This provides a self-contained theory that not only reproduces all the known classical results, but also gives new insights on the statistical properties of these systems.

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).