We study Legendrian singularities arising in complex contact geometry. We define a one-parameter family of bases in the ring of Legendrian characteristic classes such that any Legendrian Thom polynomial has nonnegative coefficients when expanded in these bases. The method uses a suitable Lagrange Grassmann bundle on the product of projective spaces. This is an extension of a nonnegativity result for Lagrangian Thom polynomials obtained by the authors previously. For a fixed specialization, other special- izations of the parameter lead to upper bounds for the coefficients of the given basis. One gets also upper bounds of the coefficients from the positivity of classical Thom polynomials (of singularities of mappings), obtained previously by the last two authors.

We develop deformation theory for abelian invariant complex structures on a nilmanifold, and prove that in this case the invariance property is preserved by the Kuranishi process. A purely algebraic condition characterizes the deformations leading again to abelian structures, and we prove that such deformations are unobstructed. Various examples illustrate the resulting theory, and the behavior possible in three complex dimensions.

We study weakly trapped submanifolds of codimension two in a standard static spacetime. In this setting, we apply some generalized maximum principles in order to investigate the geometry of these trapped submanifolds. For instance, we establish sufficient conditions to guarantee that such a spacelike submanifold must be a hypersurface of the Riemannian base of the ambient spacetime. As a consequence, we prove that there do not exist n-dimensional compact (without boundary) trapped submanifolds immersed in an (n+2)-dimensional standard static spacetime. Such a nonexistence result was originally obtained for stationary spacetimes by Mars and Senovilla [20]. Furthermore, we also investigate parabolic weakly trapped submanifolds immersed in a standard static spacetime.

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Let φ∈C^0∩W_{1,2}(Σ,X) where Σ is a compact Riemann surface, X is a compact locally CAT(1) space, and W_{1,2}(Σ,X) is defined as in Korevaar-Schoen. We use the technique of harmonic replacement to prove that either there exists a harmonic map u: Σ → X homotopic to φ or there exists a nontrivial conformal harmonic map v: S^2 → X. To complete the argument, we prove compactness for energy minimizers and a removable singularity theorem for conformal harmonic maps.