The deformation theory of hyperbolic and Euclidean cone-manifolds with all cone angles less than 2 plays an important role in many problems in low-dimensional topology and in the geometrization of 3-manifolds. Furthermore, various old conjectures dating back to Stoker about the moduli space of convex hyperbolic and Euclidean polyhedra can be reduced to the study of deformations of cone-manifolds by doubling a polyhedron across its faces. This deformation theory has been understood by Hodgson and Kerckhoff [7] when the singular set has no vertices, and by Weiß [32] when the cone angles are less than . We prove here an infinitesimal rigidity result valid for cone angles less than 2, stating that infinitesimal deformations which leave the dihedral angles fixed are trivial in the hyperbolic case, and reduce to some simple deformations in the Euclidean case. The method is to treat this as a problem concerning the deformation theory of singular Einstein metrics, and to apply analytic methods about elliptic operators on stratified spaces. This work is an important ingredient in the local deformation theory of cone-manifolds by the second author [22]; see also the concurrent work by Weiß [33].

We consider compact submanifolds of dimension n  2 in Rn+k, with nonzero mean curvature vector everywhere, and such that the full norm of the second fundamental form is bounded by a fixed multiple (depending on n) of the length of the mean curvature vector at every point. We prove that the mean curvature flow deforms such a submanifold to a point in finite time, and that the solution is asymptotic to a shrinking sphere in some (n + 1)- dimensional affine subspace of Rn+k.

In this article we show how the classical theory of Reeb and others extends to the case of codimension one singular foliations on closed oriented manifolds, provided that at the singular set sing(F), the foliation is locally defined by Bott-Morse functions which are transversely centers. We prove, in this setting, the equivalent of the local and the complete stability theorems of Reeb. We show that if F has a compact leaf with finite fundamental group, or if a component of sing(F) has codimension ≥ 3 and finite fundamental group, then all leaves of F are compact and diffeomorphic, sing(F) consists of two connected components, and there is a Bott-Morse function f : M → [0, 1] such that f : M \ sing(F) → (0, 1) is a fiber bundle defining F and sing(F) = f.1({0, 1}). This yields a topological description of the type of leaves that appear in these foliations, and also the type of manifolds admitting such foliations. These results unify and generalize well known results for cohomogeneity one isometric actions, and a theorem of Reeb for foliations with Morse singularities of center type.

There have been many attempts to define the notion of quasilocal mass for a spacelike 2-surface in spacetime by the Hamilton-Jacobi analysis. The essential difficulty in this approach is to identify the right choice of the background configuration to be subtracted from the physical Hamiltonian. Quasilocal mass should be nonnegative for surfaces in general spacetime and zero for surfaces in flat spacetime. In this letter, we propose a new definition of gauge-independent quasilocal mass and prove that it has the desired properties.

In this article, we continue the work in Guan-Li and study a normalized hypersurface flow in the more general ambient setting of warped product spaces. This flow preserves the volume of the bounded domain enclosed by a graphical hypersurface, and monotonically decreases the hypersurface area. As an application, the isoperimetric problem in warped product spaces is solved for such domains.