Continuing the program of [DS] and [U1], we introduce refinements of the Donaldson-Smith standard surface count which are designed to count nodal pseudoholomorphic curves and curves with a prescribed decomposition into reducible components. In cases where a corresponding analogue of the Gromov-Taubes invariant is easy to define, our invariants agree with those analogues. We also prove a vanishing result for some of the invariants that count nodal curves.

We show the regularity of, and derive a-priori estimates for (weakly) harmonic maps from a Riemannian manifold into a Euclidean sphere under the assumption that the image avoids some neighborhood of a half-equator. The proofs combine constructions of strictly convex functions and the regularity theory of quasilinear elliptic systems. We apply these results to the spherical and Euclidean Bernstein problems for minimal hypersurfaces, obtaining new conditions under which compact minimal hypersurfaces in spheres or complete minimal hypersurfaces in Euclidean spaces are trivial.

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Unit tangent bundle of a surface carries various information of tangent vector fields on that surface. For 2-spheres (ie genus-zero closed surfaces), the unit tangent bundle is a closed 3-manifold that has non-trivial topology and cannot be embedded in R3. Therefore it cannot be constructed by existing mesh generation algorithms directly. This work aims at the first discrete construction of unit tangent bundles over 2-spheres using tetrahedral meshes. We propose a two-stage algorithm for the construction, which starts from constructing two local bundles and then combines them into a global bundle.

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