Using the degeneration formula for Donaldson-Thomas invariants [L-W,MNOP2], we proved formulae for blowing up a point, simple flops, and extremal transitions.

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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].

In this paper, we derive some local a priori estimates for the Ricci flow. This gives rise to some strong uniqueness theorems. As a corollary, let g(t) be a smooth complete solution to the Ricci flow on R3, with the canonical Euclidean metric E as initial data, then g(t) is trivial, i.e. g(t) ≡ E.

Let $\Omega $ be a bounded $C^2$ domain in $R^n$ and $\phi : \partial \Omega \to \mathbb{R}^m$ be a continuous map. The Dirichlet problem for the minimal surface system asks whether there exists a Lipschitz map $f : \Omega \to \mathbb{R}^m$ with $ f |_{\partial \Omega}$ and with the graph of $f$ a minimal submanifold in $R^{n+m}$. For $m = 1$, the Dirichlet problem was solved more than thirty years ago by Jenkins-Serrin [13] for any mean convex domains and the solutions are all smooth. This paper considers the Dirichlet problem for convex domains in arbitrary codimension $m$. We prove if $\psi : \bar{\Omega} \to \mathbb{R}^m$ satisfies $8n\delta sup_{\Omega}||D^2 \psi| + \sqrt{2} sup_{\partial \Omega} |D\psi| <1$, then the Dirichlet problem for $ \psi |_{\partial \Omega}$ is solvable in smooth maps. Here $\delta$ is the diameter of $\Omega$ . Such a condition is necessary in view of an example of Lawson-Osserman [15]. In order to prove this result, we study the associated parabolic system and solve the Cauchy-Dirichlet problem with $\psi$ as initial data.