In this paper, we provide new necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of Kähler–Einstein metrics on small deformations of a Fano Kähler–Einstein manifold. We also show that the Weil–Petersson metric can be approximated by the Ricci curvatures of the canonical L^2 metrics on the direct image bundles. In addition, we describe the plurisubharmonicity of the energy functional of harmonic maps on the Kuranishi space of the deformation of compact Kähler–Einstein manifolds of general type.

The paper develops an existence theory for solutions of the Abreu equation, which include extremal metrics on toric surfaces. The technique employed is a continuity method, combined with “blow-up” arguments. General existence results are obtained, assuming a hypothesis (the “M-condition”) on the solutions, which is shown to be related to the injectivity radius.

In this paper we prove a new matrix Li-Yau-Hamilton (LYH) estimate for K¨ahler-Ricci flow on manifolds with nonnegative bi- sectional curvature. The form of this new LYH estimate is obtained by the interpolation consideration originated in [Ch] by Chow. This new inequality is shown to be connected with Perelman’s entropy formula through a family of differential equalities. In the rest of the paper, we show several applications of this new estimate and its corresponding estimate for linear heat equation. These include a sharp heat kernel comparison theorem, generalizing the earlier result of Li and Tian [LT], a manifold version of Stoll’s theorem [St] on the characterization of ‘algebraic divisors’, and a localized monotonicity formula for analytic subvari- eties, which sharpens the Bishop volume comparison theorem. Motivated by the connection between the heat kernel estimate and the reduced volume monotonicity of Perelman [P], we prove a sharp lower bound of the fundamental solution to the forward conjugate heat equation, which in a certain sense dual to Perelman’s monotonicity of the reduced volume. As an application of this new monotonicity formula, we show that the blow-down limit of a certain type of long-time solution is a gradient expanding soliton, generalizing an earlier result of Cao. We also illustrate the connection between the new LYH estimate and the Hessian comparison theorem of [FIN] on the forward reduced distance. Localized monotonicity formulae on entropy and forward reduced volume are also derived.

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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].