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Motivated by new explicit positive Ricci curvature metrics on the four-sphere which are also Einstein-Weyl, we show that the dimension of the Einstein-Weyl moduli near certain Einstein metrics is bounded by the rank of the isometry group and that any Weyl manifold can be embedded as a hypersurface with prescribed second fundamental form in some Einstein-Weyl space. Closed four-dimensional Einstein-Weyl manifolds are proved to be absolute minima of the L²-norm of the curvature of Weyl manifolds and a local version of the Lafontaine inequality is obtained. The above metrics on the four-sphere are shown to contain minimal hypersurfaces isometric to S¹S² whose second fundamental form has constant length.

For two nearby disjoint coassociative submanifolds C and C′ in a G2-manifold, we construct thin instantons with boundaries lying on C and C′ from regular J-holomorphic curves in C. We explain their relationship with the Seiberg-Witten invariants for C.

By studying modular invariance properties of some characteristic forms, we prove some new anomaly cancellation formulas which generalize the Han-Zhang and Han-Liu-Zhang anomaly cancellation formulas

We introduce a technique based on Gaussian maps to study whether a surface can lie on a threefold as a very ample divisor with given normal bundle. We give applications, among which one to surfaces of general type and another to Enriques surfaces. In particular, we prove the genus bound g  17 for Enriques Fano threefolds. Moreover we find a new Enriques-Fano threefold of genus 9 whose normalization has canonical but not terminal singularities and does not admit Q-smoothings.