Vector cross product structures on manifolds include symplectic, volume, G2- and Spin(7)-structures. We show that the knot spaces of such manifolds have natural symplectic structures, and relate instantons and branes in these manifolds to holomorphic disks and Lagrangian submanifolds in their knot spaces. For the complex case, the holomorphic volume form on a Calabi–Yau manifold defines a complex vector cross product structure. We show that its isotropic knot space admits a natural holomorphic symplectic structure.We also relate the Calabi–Yau geometry of the manifold to the holomorphic symplectic geometry of its isotropic knot space.

We prove several vanishing theorems for a class of generalized elliptic genera on foliated manifolds, by using classical equivariant index theory. The main techniques are the use of the Jacobi theta-functions and the construction of a new class of elliptic operators associated to foliations.

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On a Fano manifold, we prove that the KhlerRicci flow starting from a Khler metric in the anti-canonical class which is sufficiently close to a KhlerEinstein metric must converge in a polynomial rate to a KhlerEinstein metric. The convergence cannot happen in general if we study the flow on the level of Khler potentials. Instead we exploit the interpretation of the Ricci flow as the gradient flow of Perelman's functional. This involves modifying the Ricci flow by a canonical family of gauges. In particular, the complex structure of the limit could be different in general. The main technical ingredient is a Lojasiewicz type inequality for Perelman's functional near a critical point.

The notion of a generalized CRF-structure on a smooth manifold was recently introduced and studied by Vaisman (2008)[6]. An important class of generalized CRF-structures on an odd dimensional manifold M consists of CRF-structures having complementary frames of the form , where is a vector field and is a 1-form on M with ()= 1. It turns out that these kinds of CRF-structures give rise to a special class of what we called strong generalized contact structures in Poon and Wade [5]. More precisely, we show that to any CRF-structures with complementary frames of the form , there corresponds a canonical Lie bialgebroid. Finally, we explain the relationship between generalized contact structures and another generalization of the notion of a CauchyRiemann structure on a manifold.