We give a shorter proof of the existence of nontrivial closed minimal hypersurfaces in closed smooth (n + 1)-dimensional Riemannian manifolds, a theorem proved first by Pitts for 2 ≤ n ≤ 5 and extended later by Schoen and Simon to any n.

Let X be a compact complex, not necessarily K¨ahler, manifold of dimension n. We characterize the volume of any holomorphic line bundle L → X as the supremum R of the Monge-Amp`ere masses X Tn ac over all closed positive currents T in the first Chern class of L, where Tac is the absolutely continuous part of T in its Lebesgue decomposition. This result, new in the non-K¨ahler context, can be seen as holomorphic Morse inequalities for the cohomology of high tensor powers of line bundles endowed with arbitrarily singular Hermitian metrics. It gives, in particular, a new bigness criterion for line bundles in terms of existence of singular Hermitian metrics satisfying positivity conditions. The proof is based on the construction of a new regularization for closed (1, 1)-currents with a control of the Monge-Amp`ere masses of the approximating sequence. To this end, we prove a potential-theoretic result in one complex variable and study the growth of multiplier ideal sheaves associated with increasingly singular metrics.

In the first paper of this series, “Electrodynamics and the Gauss Linking Integral on the 3-sphere and in Hyperbolic 3-space,” we developed a steady-state version of classical electrodynamics in these two spaces, including explicit formulas for the vector-valued Green’s operator, explicit formulas of Biot-Savart type for the magnetic field, and a corresponding Amp`ere’s Law contained in Maxwell’s equations, and then used these to obtain explicit inte- gral formulas for the linking number of two disjoint closed curves. In this second paper, we obtain integral formulas for twisting, writhing, and helicity, and prove that link = twist + writhe on the 3-sphere and in hyperbolic 3-space. We then use these results to derive upper bounds for the helicity of vector fields and lower bounds for the first eigenvalue of the curl operator on subdomains of these two spaces. An announcement of these results, and a hint of their proofs, can be found in the Math ArXiv, math.GT/0406276, while an expanded version of the first paper, with full proofs, can be found at math.GT/0510388.

The purpose of this paper is to organize some results on the local geometry of CR singular real-analytic manifolds that are images of CR manifolds via a CR map that is a diffeomorphism onto its image. We find a necessary (sufficient in dimension 2) condition for the diffeomorphism to extend to a finite holomorphic map. The multiplicity of this map is a biholomorphic invariant that is precisely the Moser invariant of the image, when it is a Bishop surface with vanishing Bishop invariant. In higher dimensions, we study Levi-flat CR singular images and we prove that the set of CR singular points must be large, and in the case of codimension 2, necessarily Levi-flat or complex. We also show that there exist real-analytic CR functions on such images that satisfy the tangential CR conditions at the singular points, yet fail to extend to holomorphic functions in a neighborhood. We provide many examples to illustrate the phenomena that arise.

For a smooth projective toric surface we determine the Donaldson invariants and their wallcrossing in terms of the Nekrasov partition function. Using the solution of the Nekrasov conjecture [33, 38, 3] and its refinement [34], we apply this result to give a generating function for the wallcrossing of Donaldson invariants of good walls of simply connected projective surfaces with b+ = 1 in terms of modular forms. This formula was proved earlier in [19] more generally for simply connected 4-manifolds with b+ = 1, as- suming the Kotschick-Morgan conjecture, and it was also derived by physical arguments in [31].