We introduce a new geometric flow, called the chord shortening flow, which is the negative gradient flow for the length functional on the space of chords with end points lying on a fixed submanifold in Euclidean space. As an application, we give a simplified proof of a classical theorem of Lusternik and Schnirelmann (and a generalization by Riede and Hayashi) on the existence of multiple orthogonal geodesic chords. For a compact convex planar domain, we show that any convex chord not orthogonal to the boundary would shrink to a point in finite time under the flow.

In this note, we discuss the mean curvature flow of graphs of maps between Riemannian manifolds. Special emphasis will be placed on estimates of the flow as a non-linear parabolic system of differential equations. Several global existence theorems and applications to isotopy problems in geometry and topology will be presented. The results are based on joint works of the author with his collaborators I. Medo\v{s}, K. Smoczyk, and M.-P. Tsui.

After Bershadsky-Cecotti-Ooguri-Vafa, we introduce an invariant of Calabi-Yau threefolds, which we call the BCOV invariant and which we obtain using analytic torsion. We give an explicit formula for the BCOV invariant as a function on the compactified moduli space, when it is isomorphic to a projective line. As a corollary, we prove the formula for the BCOV invariant of quintic mirror threefolds conjectured by Bershadsky-Cecotti-Ooguri-Vafa.

We show that the complex cohomologies of Bott, Chern, and Aeppli and the symplectic cohomologies of Tseng and Yau arise in the context of type II string theory. Specifically, they can be used to count a subset of scalar moduli fields in Minkowski compactification with RR fluxes in the presence of either O5/D5 or O6/D6 brane sources, respectively. Further, we introduce a new set of cohomologies within the generalized complex geometry framework which interpolate between these known complex and symplectic cohomologies. The generalized complex cohomologies play the analogous role for counting massless fields for a general supersymmetric Minkowski type II compactification with Ramond–Ramond flux.

The authors proved in [5] that in a complete, connected, and simply connected Riemannian manifold, the volume of the intersection of two small geodesic balls depends only on the distance between the centers and the radii if and only if the space is harmonic. In this paper, we show that this proposition remains true, if the condition is restricted to balls of equal radii.