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.

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We consider 3-dimensional hyperbolic cone-manifolds which are “convex co-compact” in a natural sense, with cone singularities along infinite lines. Such singularities are sometimes used by physicists as models for massive spinless point particles. We prove an infinitesimal rigidity statement when the angles around the singular lines are less than π: any infinitesimal deformation changes either these angles, or the conformal structure at infinity with marked points corresponding to the endpoints of the singular lines. Moreover, any small variation of the conformal structure at infinity and of the singular angles can be achieved by a unique small deformation of the cone-manifold structure. These results hold also when the singularities are along a graph, i.e., for “interacting particles”.

We apply the mean curvature flow to deform symplectomorphisms of CP^n. In particular, we prove that, for each dimension n, there exists a constant , explicitly computable, such that anypinched symplectomorphism of CP^n is symplectically isotopic to a biholomorphic isometry.

We consider closed orientable hypersurfaces in a wide class of warped product manifolds which include space forms, deSitter-Schwarzschild and Reissner-Nordstr\"{o}m manifolds. By using a new integral formula or Brendle's Heintze-Karcher type inequality, we present some new characterizations of umbilic hypersurfaces. These results can be viewed as generalizations of the classical Jellet-Liebmann theorem and the Alexandrov theorem in Euclidean space. In particular, Corollary 1.8 implies that the embeddedness condition in Theorem 2 of [Brendle-Eichmair, JDG. 2013] is not necessary.