We use adiabatic limits to study foliated manifolds. The Bott connection naturally shows up as the adiabatic limit of Levi-Civita connections. As an application, we then construct certain natural elliptic operators associated to the foliation and present a direct geometric proof of a vanshing theorem of Connes [Co], which extends the Lichnerowicz vanishing theorem [L] to foliated manifolds with spin leaves, for what we call almost Riemannian foliations. Several new vanishing theorems are also proved by using our method.

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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.

Let M be a compact n-dimensional Riemannian manifold with nonnegative Ricci curvature and mean convex boundary ∂M. Assume that the mean curvature H of the boundary ∂M satisfies H≥(n−1)k>0 for some positive constant k. In this paper, we prove that the distance function d to the boundary ∂M is bounded from above by 1/𝑘 and the upper bound is achieved if and only if M is isometric to an n-dimensional Euclidean ball of radius 1/𝑘.

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