In this paper, we establish a Bochner type formula on Alexandrov spaces with Ricci curvature bounded below. Yau’s gradient estimate for harmonic functions is also obtained on Alexandrov spaces.

The Ward equation, also called the modified 2+1 chiral model,is obtained by a dimension reduction and a gauge fixing from the self-dual Yang-Mills field equation on R2,2. It has a Lax pair and is an integrable system. Ward constructed solitons whose ex- tended solutions have distinct simple poles. He also used a limiting method to construct 2-solitons whose extended solutions have a double pole. Ioannidou and Zakrzewski, and Anand constructed more soliton solutions whose extended solutions have a double or triple pole. Some of the main results of this paper are: (i) We construct algebraic B¨acklund transformations (BTs) that generate new solutions of the Ward equation from a given one by an algebraic method. (ii) We use an order k limiting method and algebraic BTs to construct explicit Ward solitons, whose extended solutions have arbitrary poles and multiplicities. (iii) We prove that our construction gives all solitons of the Ward equation explicitly and the entries of Ward solitons must be rational functions in x, y and t. (iv) Since stationary Ward solitons are unitons, our method also gives an explicit construction of all k-unitons from finite sequences of rational maps from C to Cn.

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Let F be a foliation in a closed 3-manifold with negatively curved fundamental group and suppose that F is almost trans- verse to a quasigeodesic pseudo-Anosov °ow. We show that the leaves of the foliation in the universal cover extend continuously to the sphere at in¯nity; therefore the limit sets of the leaves are continuous images of the circle. One important corollary is that if F is a Reebless, ¯nite depth foliation in a hyperbolic 3-manifold, then it has the continuous extension property. Such ¯nite depth foliations exist whenever the second Betti number is non zero. The result also applies to other classes of foliations, including a large class of foliations where all leaves are dense, and in¯nitely many examples with one sided branching. One extremely useful tool is a detailed understanding of the topological structure and asymptotic properties of the 1-dimensional foliations in the leaves of e F induced by the stable and unstable foliations of the °ow.

Inspired by the Gromov-Hausdorff distance, we define a new notion called the intrinsic flat distance between oriented m dimensional Riemannian manifolds with boundary by isometrically embedding the manifolds into a common metric space, measuring the flat distance between them and taking an infimum over all isometric embeddings and all common metric spaces. This is made rigorous by applying Ambrosio-Kirchheim’s extension of FedererFleming’s notion of integral currents to arbitrary metric spaces. We prove the intrinsic flat distance between two compact oriented Riemannian manifolds is zero iff they have an orientation preserving isometry between them. Using the theory of AmbrosioKirchheim, we study converging sequences of manifolds and their limits, which are in a class of metric spaces that we call integral current spaces. We describe the properties of such spaces including the fact that they are countably Hm rectifiable spaces and present numerous examples.