Suppose L is a lamination of a Riemannian manifold by hypersurfaces with the same constant mean curvature H. We prove that every limit leaf of L is stable for the Jacobi operator. A simple but important consequence of this result is that the set of stable leaves of L has the structure of a lamination.

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On a K-unstable toric variety we show the existence of an optimal destabilising convex function. We show that if this is piecewise linear then it gives rise to a decomposition into semistable pieces analogous to the Harder-Narasimhan filtration of an unstable vector bundle. We also show that if the Calabi flow exists for all time on a toric variety then it minimizes the Calabi functional. In this case the infimum of the Calabi functional is given by the supremum of the normalized Futaki invariants over all destabilising test-configurations, as predicted by a conjecture of Donaldson.

We show that the notion of hyperconvex representation due to F. Labourie gives a geometric characterization of the representations of a surface group in PSLn(R) that belong to the Hitchin component.

Ricci flow deforms the Riemannian metric proportionally to the curvature, such that the curvature evolves according to a heat diffusion process and eventually becomes constant everywhere. Ricci flow has demonstrated its great potential by solving various problems in many fields, which can be hardly handled by alternative methods so far.