We study minimal hypersurfaces in manifolds of non-negative Ricci curvature, Euclidean volume growth and quadratic curvature decay at infinity. By comparison with capped spherical cones, we identify a precise borderline for the Ricci curvature decay. Above this value, no complete area-minimizing hypersurfaces exist. Below this value, in contrast, we construct examples.

The semi-classical data attached to stacks of algebroids in the sense of Kashiwara and Kontsevich are Maurer-Cartan elements on complex manifolds, which we call extended Poisson structures as they generalize holomorphic Poisson structures. A canonical Lie algebroid is associated to each Maurer-Cartan element. We study the geometry underlying these Maurer-Cartan elements in the light of Lie algebroid theory. In particular, we extend Lichnerowicz-Poisson cohomology and Koszul-Brylinski homology to the realm of extended Poisson manifolds; we establish a sufficient criterion for these to be finite dimensional; we describe how homology and cohomology are related through the Evens-Lu-Weinstein duality module; and we describe a duality on Koszul-Brylinski homology, which generalizes the Serre duality of Dolbeault cohomology.

We consider a 1-parameter family of strictly convex hypersurfaces in Rn+1 moving with speed −Kαν, where ν denotes the outward-pointing unit normal vector and α⩾1/(n+2). For α>1/(n+2), we show that the flow converges to a round sphere after rescaling. In the affine invariant case α=1/(n+2), our arguments give an alternative proof of the fact that the flow converges to an ellipsoid after rescaling.

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In a previous paper we have constructed an invariant of fourdimensional manifolds with boundary in the form of an element in the stable homotopy group of the Seiberg-Witten Floer spectrum of the boundary. Here we prove that when one glues two four- manifolds along their boundaries, the Bauer-Furuta invariant of the resulting manifold is obtained by applying a natural pairing to the invariants of the pieces. As an application, we show that the connected sum of three copies of the K3 surface contains no exotic nuclei. In the process we also compute the Floer spectrum for several Seifert fibrations.