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We develop some results from [4] on the positivity of direct image bundles in the particular case of a trivial ¯bration over a one-dimensional base. We also apply the results to study variations of KÄahler metrics.

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.

We consider reparametrizations of Heisenberg nilflows.We show that if a Heisenberg nilflow is uniquely ergodic, all non-trivial timechanges within a dense subspace of smooth time-changes are mixing. Equivalently, in the language of special flows, we consider special flows over linear skew-shift extensions of irrational rotations of the circle. Without assuming any Diophantine condition on the frequency, we define a dense class of smooth roof functions for which the corresponding special flows are mixing whenever the roof function is not a coboundary. Mixing is produced by a mechanism known as stretching of ergodic sums. The complement of the set of mixing time-changes (or, equivalently, of mixing roof functions) has countable codimension and can be explicitly described in terms of the invariant distributions for the nilflow (or, equivalently,for the skew-shift), producing concrete examples of mixing time-changes.

H. Hopf showed that the only constant mean curvature sphere S2 immersed in R3 is the round sphere. The K¨ahler framework is an adequate approach to generalize Hopf’ s theorem to higher dimensions. When ϕ : M → Rn is an isometric immersion from a K¨ahler manifold, the complexified second fundamental form α splits according to types. The (1, 1) part of the second fundamental form plays the role of the mean curvature for surfaces and will be called the pluri-mean curvature pmc. Therefore isometric immersions with parallel pluri-mean curvature (ppmc isometric immersions) generalize in a natural way the cmc immersions. It is a standard fact that R8 is the smallest space where CP2 can be embedded. The aim of this work is to generalize Hopf’s theorem proving in particular that the only ppmc isometric immersion from CP2 into R8 is the standard immersion.