We construct a new family of high genus examples of free boundary minimal surfaces in the Euclidean unit 3-ball by desingularizing the intersection of a coaxial pair of a critical catenoid and an equatorial disk. The surfaces are constructed by singular perturbation methods and have three boundary components. They are the free boundary analogue of the Costa-Hoffman-Meeks surfaces and the surfaces constructed by Kapouleas by desingularizing coaxial catenoids and planes. It is plausible that the minimal surfaces we constructed here are the same as the ones obtained recently by Ketover using the min-max method.

In this paper, we study the shape of the min-max minimal hypersurface produced by Almgren-Pitts in F. Almgren, and J. Pitts, corresponding to the fundamental class of a Riemannian manifold $(M^{n+1}, g)$of positive Ricci curvature with 2 ≤ n ≤ 6. We characterize the Morse index, volume and multiplicity of this min-max hypersurface. In particular, we show that the min-max hypersurface is either orientable and of index one, or is a double cover of a non-orientable minimal hypersurface with least area among all closed embedded minimal hypersurfaces.

We consider a characteristic problem of the vacuum Einstein equations with part of the initial data given on a future asymptotically flat null cone, and show that the solution exists uniformly around the null cone for general such initial data. Therefore, the solution contains a piece of the future null infinity. The initial data are not required to be small and the decaying condition is consistent with those in the works of [8] and [11].

We develop foundational theory for the Laplacian flow for closed G2 structures which will be essential for future study. (1). We prove Shi-type derivative estimates for the Riemann curvature tensor Rm and torsion tensor T along the flow, i.e. that a bound on Λ(x,t)=(|∇T(x,t)|^2g(t)+|Rm(x,t)|^2g(t))^{1/2} will imply bounds on all covariant derivatives of Rm and T. (2). We show that Λ(x,t) will blow up at a finite-time singularity, so the flow will exist as long as Λ(x,t) remains bounded. (3). We give a new proof of forward uniqueness and prove backward uniqueness of the flow, and give some applications. (4). We prove a compactness theorem for the flow and use it to strengthen our long time existence result from (2) to show that the flow will exist as long as the velocity of the flow remains bounded. (5). Finally, we study soliton solutions of the Laplacian flow.

Fixing a weakly unobstructed Lagrangian torus in a symplectic manifold X, we define a holomorphic function W known as the Floer potential. We construct a canonical A∞-functor from the Fukaya category of X to the category of matrix factorizations of W. It provides a unified way to construct matrix factorizations from Lagrangian Floer theory. The technique is applied to toric Fano manifolds to transform Lagrangian branes to matrix factorizations. Using the method, we also obtain an explicit expression of the matrix factorization mirror to the real locus of the complex projective space.