The main purpose of this paper is to prove a general result about the geometry of holomorphic line bundles over Khler manifolds. This result is essentially a partial verification of a conjecture of Tian [30] and Tian has, over many years, highlighted the importance of the question for the existence theory of KhlerEinstein metrics. We will begin by stating this main result.

We prove a lower bound for the first Steklov eigenvalue of embedded minimal hypersurfaces with free boundary in a compact n-dimensional Riemannian manifold which has nonnegative Ricci curvature and strictly convex boundary. When n=3, this implies an apriori curvature estimate for these minimal surfaces in terms of the geometry of the ambient manifold and the topology of the minimal surface. An important consequence of the estimate is a smooth compactness theorem for embedded minimal surfaces with free boundary when the topological type of these minimal surfaces is fixed.

This is the very first paper to focus on the CR analogue of Yau’s uniformization conjecture in a complete noncompact pseudohermitian (2n+1)-manifold of vanishing torsion (i.e. Sasakian manifold) which is an odd dimensional counterpart of K¨ahler geometry. In this paper, we mainly deal with the problem of the sharp dimension estimate of CR holomorphic functions in a complete noncompact pseudohermitian manifold of vanishing torsion with nonnegative pseudohermitian bisectional curvature.

We consider surfaces M2 immersed in En c × R, where En c is a simply connected n-dimensional complete Riemannian manifold with constant sectional curvature c 6= 0, and assume that the mean curvature vector of the immersion is parallel in the normal bundle. We consider further a Hopf-type complex quadratic form Q on M2, where the complex structure of M2 is compatible with the induced metric. It is not hard to check that Q is holomorphic (see [3], p.289). We will use this fact to give a reasonable description of immersed surfaces in En c ×R that have parallel mean curvature vector.

We study isometric Lie group actions on symmetric spaces admitting a section, i.e., a submanifold that meets all orbits orthogonally at every intersection point. We classify such actions on the compact symmetric spaces with simple isometry group and rank greater than one. In particular, we show that these actions are hyperpolar, i.e., the sections are flat.