An odd Seiberg-Witten invariant imposes bounds on the signature of a closed, almost complex 4-manifold with vanishing first Chern class. This applies in particular to symplectic 4-manifolds of Kodaira dimension zero.

We construct many new non-liftable three-dimensional Calabi–Yau spaces in positive characteristic. The technique relies on lifting a nodal model to a smooth rigid Calabi–Yau space over some number field as introduced by one of us jointily with D. van Straten.

We solve the Plateau problem for marginally outer trapped surfaces in general Cauchy data sets. We employ the Perron method and tools from geometric measure theory to force and control a blow-up of Jang’s equation. Substantial new geometric insights regarding the lower order properties of marginally outer trapped surfaces are gained in the process. The techniques developed in this paper are flexible and can be adapted to other non-variational existence problems.

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We determine a global structure of the moduli space of self-dual metrics on 3CP2 satisfying the following three properties: (i) the scalar curvature is of positive type, (ii) they admit a non-trivial Killing field, (iii) they are not conformal to the LeBrun’s self- dual metrics based on the ‘hyperbolic ansatz’. We prove that the moduli space of these metrics is isomorphic to an orbifold R3/G, where G is an involution of R3 having two-dimensional fixed locus. In particular, the moduli space is non-empty and connected. We also remark that Joyce’s self-dual metrics with torus symmetry appear as a limit of our self-dual metrics. Our proof of the result is based on the twistor theory. We first determine a defining equation of a projective model of the twistor space of the metric, and then prove that the projective model is always birational to a twistor space, by determining the family of twistor lines. In determining them, a key role is played by a classical result in algebraic geometry that a smooth plane quartic always possesses twenty-eight bitangents.