We study the action of the group of contact diffeomorphisms on CR deformations of compact three dimensional CR manifolds. Using anisotropic function spaces and an anisotropic structure on the space of contact diffeomorphisms, we establish the existence of local transverse slices to the action of the contact diffeomorphism group in the neighborhood of a fixed embeddable strongly pseudoconvex CR structure.

This note is based on a series of four lectures the author gave at University of Montpellier, September 28-30, 2015. He started with the notion of mass in general relativity, gave a brief review of some known constructions of quasi-local mass, and then discussed the new quasi-local energy and quasi-local mass which Shing-Tung Yau and the author introduced in 2009. At the end, the proof of the positivity of quasi-local energy was sketched and a stability theorem of critical points of quasi-local energy by Po-Ning Chen, Shing-Tung Yau, and the author was discussed

We show that closed hypersurfaces in Euclidean space with nonnegative scalar curvature are weakly mean convex. In contrast, the statement is no longer true if the scalar curvature is replaced by the kth mean curvature, for k greater than 2, as we construct the counterexamples for all k greater than 2. Our proof relies on a new geometric argument which relates the scalar curvature and mean curvature of a hypersurface to the mean curvature of the level sets of a height function. By extending the argument, we show that complete noncompact asymptotically flat hypersurfaces with nonnegative scalar curvature are weakly mean convex and prove the positive mass theorem for such hypersurfaces in all dimensions.

We prove that for every non-negative integer g, there exists a bound on the number of ends of a complete, embedded minimal surface M in R3 of genus g and finite topology. This bound on the finite number of ends when M has at least two ends implies that M has finite stability index which is bounded by a constant that only depends on its genus.

In this paper, we initiate the study of the instability of naked singularities without symmetries. In a series of papers, Christodoulou proved that naked singularities are not stable in the context of the spherically symmetric Einstein equations coupled with a massless scalar field. We study in this paper the next simplest case: a characteristic initial value problem of this coupled system with the initial data given on two intersecting null cones, the incoming one of which is assumed to be spherically symmetric and singular at its vertex, and the outgoing one of which has no symmetries. It is shown that, arbitrarily fixing the initial scalar field, the set of the initial conformal metrics on the outgoing null cone such that the maximal future development does not have any sequences of closed trapped surfaces approaching the singularity, is of first category in the whole space in which the shear tensors are continuous. Such a set can then be viewed as exceptional, although the exceptionality is weaker than the at least 1 co-dimensionality in spherical symmetry. Almost equivalently, it is also proved that, arbitrarily fixing an incoming null cone C––ε to the future of the initial incoming null cone, the set of the initial conformal metrics such that the maximal future development has at least one closed trapped surface before C––ε, contains an open and dense subset of the whole space. Since the initial scalar field can be chosen such that the singularity is naked if the initial shear is set to be zero, we may say that the spherical naked singularities of a self-gravitating scalar field are not stable under gravitational perturbations. This in particular gives new families of non-spherically symmetric gravitational perturbations different from the original spherically symmetric scalar perturbations given by Christodoulou.