We study the space of Killing fields on the four dimensional AdS spacetime AdS 3,1 . Two subsets S and O are identified: S (the spinor Killing fields) is constructed from imaginary Killing spinors, and O (the observer Killing fields) consists of all hypersurface orthogonal, future timelike unit Killing fields. When the cosmology constant vanishes, or in the Minkowski spacetime case, these two subsets have the same convex hull in the space of Killing fields. In presence of the cosmology constant, the convex hull of O is properly contained in that of S . This leads to two different notions of energy for an asymptotically AdS spacetime, the spinor energy and the observer energy. In [10], Chru\'sciel, Maerten and Tod proved the positivity of the spinor energy and derived important consequences among the related conserved quantities. We show that the positivity of the observer energy follows from the positivity of the spinor energy. A new notion called the "rest mass" of an asymptotically AdS spacetime is then defined by minimizing the observer energy, and is shown to be evaluated in terms of the adjoint representation of the Lie algebra of Killing fields. It is proved that the rest mass has the desirable rigidity property that characterizes the AdS spacetime.

We study the isoperimetric structure of asymptotically flat Riemannian 3-manifolds (M, g) that are C0-asymptotic to Schwarzschild of mass m > 0. Refining an argument due to H. Bray, we obtain an effective volume comparison theorem in Schwarzschild. We use it to show that isoperimetric regions exist in (M, g) for all sufficiently large volumes, and that they are close to centered coordinate spheres. This implies that the volume-preserving stable constant mean curvature spheres constructed by G. Huisken and S.-T. Yau as well as R. Ye as perturbations of large centered coordinate spheres minimize area among all competing surfaces that enclose the same volume. This confirms a conjecture of H. Bray. Our results are consistent with the uniqueness results for volumepreserving stable constant mean curvature surfaces in initial data sets obtained by G. Huisken and S.-T. Yau and strengthened by J. Qing and G. Tian. The additional hypotheses that the surfaces be spherical and far out in the asymptotic region in their results are not necessary in our work.

Durhuus and Jonsson (1995) introduced the class of “locally constructible” (LC) 3-spheres and showed that there are only exponentially many combinatorial types of simplicial LC 3-spheres. Such upper bounds are crucial for the convergence of models for 3D quantum gravity.

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For a sub-Riemannian manifold provided with a smooth volume, we relate the small-time asymptotics of the heat kernel at a point y of the cut locus from x with roughly “how much” y is conjugate to x. This is done under the hypothesis that all minimizers connecting x to y are strongly normal, i.e. all pieces of the trajectory are not abnormal. Our result is a refinement of the one of Leandre 4t log pt(x, y) ! −d2(x, y) for t ! 0, in which only the leading exponential term is detected. Our results are obtained by extending an idea of Molchanov from the Riemannian to the sub-Riemannian case, and some details we get appear to be new even in the Riemannian context. These results permit us to obtain properties of the sub-Riemannian distance starting from those of the heat kernel and vice versa. For the Grushin plane endowed with the Euclidean volume, we get the expansion pt(x, y)  t−5/4 exp(−d2(x, y)/4t) where y is reached from a - Riemannian point x by a minimizing geodesic which is conjugate at y.