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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In this paper we prove some results concerning stability of hypersurfaces in the four dimensional Euclidean space with zero scalar curvature. First we prove there is no complete stable hypersurface with zero scalar curvature, polynomial growth of integral of the mean curvature, and with the Gauss-Kronecker curvature bounded away from zero. We conclude this paper giving a sufficient condition for a regular domain to be stable in terms of the mean and the Gauss-Kronecker curvatures of the hypersurface and the radius of the smallest extrinsic ball which contains the domain.

We consider an ancient solution g(·, t) of the Ricci flow on a compact surface that exists for t 2 (−1, T ) and becomes spherical at time t = T . We prove that the metric g(·, t) is either a family of contracting spheres, which is a type I ancient solution, or a King–Rosenau solution, which is a type II ancient solution.

We solve the Plateau problem for marginally outer trapped surfaces in general Cauchy data sets. We employ the Perron method and tools from geometric measure theory to force and control a blow-up of Jang’s equation. Substantial new geometric insights regarding the lower order properties of marginally outer trapped surfaces are gained in the process. The techniques developed in this paper are flexible and can be adapted to other non-variational existence problems.