Using the degeneration formula for Donaldson-Thomas invariants [L-W,MNOP2], we proved formulae for blowing up a point, simple flops, and extremal transitions.

For two nearby disjoint coassociative submanifolds C and C′ in a G2-manifold, we construct thin instantons with boundaries lying on C and C′ from regular J-holomorphic curves in C. We explain their relationship with the Seiberg-Witten invariants for C.

The holonomy of the ambient metrics of Nurowski’s conformal structures associated to generic real-analytic 2-plane fields on oriented 5-manifolds is investigated. It is shown that the holonomy is always contained in the split real form G2 of the exceptional Lie group, and is equal to G2 for an open dense set of 2-plane fields given by explicit conditions. In particular, this gives an infinitedimensional family of metrics of holonomy equal to split G2. These results generalize work of Leistner-Nurowski. The inclusion of the holonomy in G2 is established by proving an ambient extension theorem for parallel tractors in the context of conformal geometry in general signature and dimension, which is expected to be of independent interest.

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We identify a strong stability condition on minimal submanifolds that implies uniqueness and dynamical stability properties. In particular, we prove a uniqueness theorem and a dynamical stability theorem of the mean curvature flow for minimal submanifolds that satisfy this condition. The latter theorem states that the mean curvature flow of any other submanifold in a neighborhood of such a minimal submanifold exists for all time, and converges exponentially to the minimal one. This extends our previous uniqueness and stability theorem which applies only to calibrated submanifolds of special holonomy ambient manifolds.