We provide a refinement of the Poincaré inequality on the torus $\mathbb{T}^{d}$ : there exists a set $\mathcal{B} \subset \mathbb{T} ^{d}$ of directions such that for every $\alpha \in \mathcal{B}$ there is a $c_{\alpha } > 0$ with $$\begin{aligned} \|\nabla f\|_{L^{2}(\mathbb{T}^{d})}^{d-1} \| \langle \nabla f, \alpha \rangle \|_{L^{2}(\mathbb{T}^{d})} \geq c_{\alpha }\|f\| _{L^{2}(\mathbb{T}^{d})}^{d} \quad \mbox{for all}~f\in H^{1}\bigl( \mathbb{T}^{d}\bigr)~ \mbox{with mean 0.} \end{aligned}$$ The derivative $\langle \nabla f, \alpha \rangle $ does not detect any oscillation in directions orthogonal to $\alpha $ , however, for certain $\alpha $ the geodesic flow in direction $\alpha $ is sufficiently mixing to compensate for that defect. On the two-dimensional torus $\mathbb{T}^{2}$ the inequality holds for $\alpha = (1, \sqrt{2})$ but is not true for $\alpha = (1,e)$ . Similar results should hold at a great level of generality on very general domains.

We define a hierarchy of Hamiltonian PDEs associated to an arbitrary tau-function in the semi-simple orbit of the Givental group action on genus expansions of Frobenius manifolds. We prove that the equations, the Hamiltonians, and the bracket are weightedhomogeneous polynomials in the derivatives of the dependent variables with respect to the space variable. In the particular case of a conformal (homogeneous) Frobenius structure, our hierarchy coincides with the Dubrovin–Zhang hierarchy that is canonically associated to the underlying Frobenius structure. Therefore, our approach allows to prove the polynomiality of the equations, Hamiltonians, and one of the Poisson brackets of these hierarchies, as conjectured by Dubrovin and Zhang.

In this paper we survey certain aspects of the classical Weil-Petersson metric and its generalizations. Being a natural L^2 metric on the parameter space of a family of complex manifolds or holomorphic vector bundles which admit some canonical metrics, the Weil-Petersson metric is well defined when the automorphism group of each fiber is discrete and the curvature of the Weil-Petersson metric can be computed via certain integrals over each fiber. We will discuss the case when these fibers have continuous automorphism groups. We also discuss the relation between the Weil-Petersson metric and energy of harmonic maps.

Given an acyclic representation  of the fundamental group of a compact oriented odd-dimensional manifold, which is close enough to an acyclic unitary representation, we define a refinement T of the Ray-Singer torsion associated to , which can be viewed as the analytic counterpart of the refined combinatorial torsion introduced by Turaev. T is equal to the graded determinant of the odd signature operator up to a correction term, the metric anomaly, needed to make it independent of the choice of the Riemannian metric.T is a holomorphic function on the space of such representations of the fundamental group. When  is a unitary representation, the absolute value of T is equal to the Ray-Singer torsion and the phase of T is proportional to the -invariant of the odd signature operator. The fact that the Ray-Singer torsion and the-invariant can be combined into one holomorphic function allows one to use methods of complex analysis to study both invariants. In particular, using these methods we compute the quotient of the refined analytic torsion and Turaev’s refinement of the combinatorial torsion generalizing in this way the classical Cheeger-M¨uller theorem. As an application, we extend and improve a result of Farber about the relationship between the Farber-Turaev absolute torsion and the -invariant. As part of our construction of T we prove several new results about determinants and -invariants of non self-adjoint elliptic operators.

Wedge product on deRham complex of a Riemannian manifold M can be pulled back to H^∗(M) via explicit homotopy, constructed using Green’s operator, to give higher product structures. We prove Fukaya’s conjecture which suggests that Witten deformation of these higher product structures have semiclassical limits as operators defined by counting gradient flow trees with respect to Morse functions, which generalizes the remarkable Witten deformation of deRham differential from a statement concerning homology to one concerning real homotopy type of M. Various applications of this conjecture to mirror symmetry are also suggested by Fukaya.