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In this paper, we study the Nakano-positivity and dual-Nakano-positivity of certain adjoint vector bundles associated to ample vector bundles. As applications, we get new vanishing theorems about ample vector bundles. For example, we prove that if E is an ample vector bundle over a compact Khler manifold E , $ S^ kE\ts\det E $ is both Nakano-positive and dual-Nakano-positive for any E . Moreover, $ H^{n, q}(X, S^ kE\ts\det E)= H^{q, n}(X, S^ kE\ts\det E)= 0$ for any E . In particular, if E is a Griffiths-positive vector bundle, the naturally induced Hermitian vector bundle $(S^ kE\ts\det E, S^ kh\ts\det h) $ is both Nakano-positive and dual-Nakano-positive for any E .

Consider a compact K¨ahler manifold Mm with Ricci curvature lower bound RicM ≥ −2 (m + 1) . Assume that its universal cover fM has maximal bottom of spectrum 1 fM = m2. Then we prove that fM is isometric to the complex hyperbolic space CHm.

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.

If M is a hyperbolic 3-manifold with a quasigeodesic flow, then we show that 1(M) acts in a natural way on a closed disc by homeomorphisms. Consequently, such a flow either has a closed orbit or the action on the boundary circle is M¨obius-like but not conjugate into PSL(2,R).We conjecture that the latter possibility cannot occur.