The deformation theory of hyperbolic and Euclidean cone-manifolds with all cone angles less than 2 plays an important role in many problems in low-dimensional topology and in the geometrization of 3-manifolds. Furthermore, various old conjectures dating back to Stoker about the moduli space of convex hyperbolic and Euclidean polyhedra can be reduced to the study of deformations of cone-manifolds by doubling a polyhedron across its faces. This deformation theory has been understood by Hodgson and Kerckhoff [7] when the singular set has no vertices, and by Weiß [32] when the cone angles are less than . We prove here an infinitesimal rigidity result valid for cone angles less than 2, stating that infinitesimal deformations which leave the dihedral angles fixed are trivial in the hyperbolic case, and reduce to some simple deformations in the Euclidean case. The method is to treat this as a problem concerning the deformation theory of singular Einstein metrics, and to apply analytic methods about elliptic operators on stratified spaces. This work is an important ingredient in the local deformation theory of cone-manifolds by the second author [22]; see also the concurrent work by Weiß [33].

We prove a quantitative bi-Lipschitz non-embedding theorem for the Heisenberg group with its Carnot–Carathéodory metric and apply it to give a lower bound on the integrality gap of the Goemans–Linial semidefinite relaxation of the sparsest cut problem.

If an (n + 2)-dimensional Lorentzian manifold is indecomposable, but non-irreducible, then its holonomy algebra is contained in the parabolic algebra (R⊕so(n)).Rn. We show that its projection onto so(n) is the holonomy algebra of a Riemannian manifold. This leads to a classification of Lorentzian holonomy groups and implies that the holonomy group of an indecomposable Lorentzian spin manifold with parallel spinor equals to G . Rn where G is a product of SU(p), Sp(q), G2 or Spin(7).

We give a complete classification of irreducible symmetric spaces for which there exist proper SL(2,R)-actions as isometries, using the criterion for proper actions by T. Kobayashi [Math. Ann. ’89] and combinatorial techniques of nilpotent orbits. In particular, we classify irreducible symmetric spaces that admit surface groups as discontinuous groups, combining this with Benoist’s theorem [Ann. Math. ’96].

The definition of quasi-local mass for a bounded space-like region in space-time is essential in several major unsettled roblems in general relativity. The quasi-local mass is expected to be a type of flux integral on the boundary two-surface $ \sum = \partial \Omega $ and should be independent of whichever space-like region $\sum $ bounds. An important idea which is related to the Hamiltonian formulation of general relativity is to consider a reference surface in a flat ambient space with the same first fundamental form and derive the quasi-local mass from the difference of the extrinsic geometries. This approach has be taken by Brown-York [4][5] and Liu-Yau [16][17] (see also related works [12], [15], [6], [14], [3], [9], [28], [32]) to define such notions using the isometric embedding theorem into the Euclidean three space. However, there exist surfaces in the Minkowski space whose quasilocal mass is strictly positive [19]. It appears that the momentum information needs to accounted for to reconcile the difference. In order to fully capture this information, we use isometric embeddings into the Minkowski space as references. In this article, we first prove an existence and uniqueness theorem for such isometric embeddings. We then solve the boundary value problem for Jang’s [13] equation as a procedure to recognize such a surface in the Minkowski space. In doing so, we discover new expression of quasi-local mass for a large class of “admissible” surfaces (see Theorem A and Remark 1.1). The new mass is positive when the ambient space-time satisfies the dominant energy condition and vanishes on surfaces in the Minkowski space. It also has the nice asymptotic behavior at spatial infinity and null infinity. Some of these results were announced in [29].