Define a “Liouville domain” to be a compact exact symplectic manifold with contact-type boundary. We use embedded contact homology to assign to each four-dimensional Liouville domain (or subset thereof) a sequence of real numbers, which we call “ECH capacities”. The ECH capacities of a Liouville domain are defined in terms of the “ECH spectrum” of its boundary, which measures the amount of symplectic action needed to represent certain classes in embedded contact homology. Using cobordism maps on embedded contact homology (defined in joint work with Taubes), we show that the ECH capacities are monotone with respect to symplectic embeddings. We compute the ECH capacities of ellipsoids, polydisks, certain subsets of the cotangent bundle of T 2, and disjoint unions of examples for which the ECH capacities are known. The resulting symplectic embedding obstructions are sharp in some interesting cases, for example for the problem of embedding an ellipsoid into a ball (as shown by McDuff-Schlenk) or embedding a disjoint union of balls into a ball. We also state and present evidence for a conjecture under which the asymptotics of the ECH capacities of a Liouville domain recover its symplectic volume.

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.

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.

We show that the attenuated geodesic ray transform on two dimensional simple surfaces is injective. Moreover, we give a stability estimate and develop a reconstruction procedure.

We study the rigidity of polyhedral surfaces and the moduli space of polyhedral surfaces using variational principles. Curvaturelike quantities for polyhedral surfaces are introduced and are shown to determine the polyhedral metric up to isometry. The action functionals in the variational approaches are derived from the cosine law. They can be considered as 2-dimensional counterparts of the Schlaefli formula.