Inspired by the work of Z. Lu and G. Tian (Duke Math. J. 125:351–387,2004) in the compact setting, in this paper we address the problem of studying the Szegö kernel of the disk bundle over a noncompact Kähler manifold. In particular we compute the Szegö kernel of the disk bundle over a Cartan–Hartogs domain based on a bounded symmetric domain. The main ingredients in our analysis are the fact that every Cartan–Hartogs domain can be viewed as an “iterated” disk bundle over its base and the ideas given in (Arezzo, Loi and Zuddas in Math. Z. 275:1207–1216,2013) for the computation of the Szegö kernel of the disk bundle over an Hermitian symmetric space of compact type.

Define a “Liouville domain” to be a compact exact symplectic manifold with contact-type boundary. We use embedded contact homology to assign to each four-dimensional Liouville domain (or subset thereof) a sequence of real numbers, which we call “ECH capacities”. The ECH capacities of a Liouville domain are defined in terms of the “ECH spectrum” of its boundary, which measures the amount of symplectic action needed to represent certain classes in embedded contact homology. Using cobordism maps on embedded contact homology (defined in joint work with Taubes), we show that the ECH capacities are monotone with respect to symplectic embeddings. We compute the ECH capacities of ellipsoids, polydisks, certain subsets of the cotangent bundle of T 2, and disjoint unions of examples for which the ECH capacities are known. The resulting symplectic embedding obstructions are sharp in some interesting cases, for example for the problem of embedding an ellipsoid into a ball (as shown by McDuff-Schlenk) or embedding a disjoint union of balls into a ball. We also state and present evidence for a conjecture under which the asymptotics of the ECH capacities of a Liouville domain recover its symplectic volume.

We generalize the results of Adams–Schoenfeld [2], finding large classes of totally geodesic Seifert surfaces in hyperbolic knot and link complements, each covering a rigid 2-orbifold embedded in some hyperbolic 3-orbifold. In addition, we provide a uniqueness theorem and demonstrate that many knots cannot possess totally geodesic Seifert surfaces by giving bounds on the width invariant in the presence of such a surface. Finally, we utilize these examples to demonstrate that the Six Theorem is sharp for knot complements in the 3-sphere.

We introduce the notion of Bonnet-Myers and Lichnerowicz sharpness in the Ollivier Ricci curvature sense. Our main result is a classification of all self-centered Bonnet-Myers sharp graphs (hypercubes, cocktail party graphs, even-dimensional demi-cubes, Johnson graphs , the Gosset graph J(2n, n) and suitable Cartesian products). We also present a purely combinatorial reformulation of this result. We show that Bonnet-Myers sharpness implies Lichnerowicz sharpness and classify all distance-regular Lichnerowicz sharp graphs under the additional condition θ_1=b_1-1. We also relate Bonnet-Myers sharpness to an upper bound of Bakry-Émery ∞-curvature, which motivates a general conjecture about Bakry-Émery ∞-curvature.

We prove the equivalence between some functional inequalities and the ultracontractivity property of the heat semigroup on infinite graphs. These functional inequalities include Sobolev inequalities, Nash inequalities, Faber–Krahn inequalities, and log-Sobolev inequalities. We also show that, under the assumptions of volume growth and CDE(n, 0), which is regarded as the natural notion of curvature on graphs, these four functional inequalities and the ultracontractivity property of the heat semigroup are all true on graphs.