Let (M, h) be a compact 4-dimensional Einstein manifold, and suppose that h is Hermitian with respect to some complex structure J on M. Then either (M, J, h) is K¨ahler-Einstein, or else, up to rescaling and isometry, it is one of the following two exceptions: the Page metric on CP2#CP2, or the Einstein metric on CP2#2CP2 discovered in [8].

We state and prove a Chern–Osserman-type inequality in terms of the volume growth for minimal surfaces$S$which have finite total extrinsic curvature and are properly immersed in a Cartan–Hadamard manifold$N$with sectional curvatures bounded from above by a negative quantity$K$_{$N$}≤$b$<0 and such that they are not too curved (on average) with respect to the hyperbolic space with constant sectional curvature given by the upper bound$b$. We also prove the same Chern–Osserman-type inequality for minimal surfaces with finite total extrinsic curvature and properly immersed in an asymptotically hyperbolic Cartan–Hadamard manifold$N$with sectional curvatures bounded from above by a negative quantity$K$_{$N$}≤$b$<0.

We study the topology of a complete asymptotically hyperbolic Einstein manifold of which its conformal boundary has positive Yamabe invariant. We prove that all maps from such manifold into any nonpositively curved manifold are homotopically trivial. Our proof is based on a Bochner type argument on harmonic maps.

This paper uses Morse-theoretic techniques to compute the equivariant Betti numbers of the space of semistable rank two degree zero Higgs bundles over a compact Riemann surface, a method in the spirit of Atiyah and Bott’s original approach for semistable holomorphic bundles. This leads to a natural proof that the hyperk¨ahler Kirwan map is surjective for the non-fixed determinant case.

Let Y be a non-singular projective manifold with an ample canonical sheaf, and let V be a Q-variation of Hodge structures of weight one on Y with Higgs bundle E1,0 ⊕ E0,1, coming from a family of Abelian varieties. If Y is a curve the Arakelov inequality says that the slopes satisfy μ(E1,0) − μ(E0,1) ≤ μ(­1 Y ). We prove a similar inequality in the higher dimensional case. If the latter is an equality, and if the discriminant of E1,0 or the one of E0,1 is zero, one hopes that Y is a Shimura variety, and V a uniformizing variation of Hodge structures. This is verified, in case the universal covering of Y does not contain factors of rank> 1. Part of the results extend to variations of Hodge structures over quasi-projective manifolds U.