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.

An inequality relating the Euler characteristic, the signature and the <i>L</i>₂-norm of the curvature of the bundle of densities is proved for a four-dimensional compact Einstein-Weyl manifold. This generalises the Hitchin-Thorpe inequality for Einstein manifolds. The case where equality occurs is discussed and related to Hitchin's classification of Ricci-flat self-dual four-manifolds and to the recent work of Gauduchon on closed non-exact Einstein-Weyl geometries.

In this paper, we sketch the proof of the extension of the stability theorem of the Minkowski space in General Relativity done explicitly in [6] and [7]. We discuss solutions of the Einstein vacuum (EV) equations (obtained in the author’s Ph.D. thesis ([6]) in 2007). We solve the Cauchy problem for more general, asymptotically flat initial data than in the pioneering work of D. Christodoulou and S. Klainerman [21] or than in any other work. Moreover, we describe precisely the asymptotic behavior. Our relaxed assumptions on the initial data yield a spacetime curvature which is not bounded in L1(M). As a major result, we encounter in our work borderline cases, which we discuss in this paper as well. The fact that certain of our estimates are borderline in view of decay indicates that the conditions in our main theorem are sharp in so far as the assumptions on the decay at infinity on the initial data are concerned. Thus, the borderline cases are a consequence of our relaxed assumptions on the data, [6, 7]. They are not present in the other works, as all of them place stronger assumptions on their data. We work with an invariant formulation of the EV equations. Our main proof is based on a bootstrap argument. To close the argument, we have to show that the spacetime curvature and the corresponding geometrical quantities have the required decay. In order to do so, the Einstein equations are decomposed with respect to specific foliations of the spacetime. This result generalizes the work of D. Christodoulou and S. Klainerman [21].

We discuss the concepts of energy and mass in relativity. On a finitely extended spatial region, they lead to the notion of quasilocal energy/mass for the boundary 2-surface in spacetime. A new definition was found in [27] that satisfies the positivity, rigidity, and asymptotics properties. The definition makes use of the surface Hamiltonian term which arises from Hamilton-Jacobi analysis of the gravitation action. The reference surface Hamiltonian is associated with an isometric embedding of the 2-surface into the Minkowski space. We discuss this new definition of mass as well as the reference surface Hamiltonian. Most of the discussion is based on joint work with PoNing Chen and Shing-Tung Yau.

In this article we show that any hyperbolic Inoue surface (also called Inoue-Hirzebruch surface of even type) admits anti-self-dual bihermitian structures. The same result holds for any of its small deformations as far as its anti-canonical system is non-empty. Similar results are obtained for parabolic Inoue surfaces. Our method also yields a family of anti-self-dual hermitian metrics on any half Inoue surface. We use the twistor method of Donaldson-Friedman [13] for the proof.