We show that for a class of C2 quasiperiodic potentials and for any fixed Diophantinefrequency, the Lyapunov exponent of the corresponding Schrödinger cocycles, as a function of energies, are uniformly positive and weakly Hölder continuous. As a corollary, we obtain that the corresponding integrated density of states is weakly Hölder continuous as well. Our approach is of purely dynamical systems, which depends on a detailed analysis of asymptotic stable and unstable directions. We also apply it to more general SL(2, R)cocycles, which in turn can be applied to get uniform positivity and continuity of Lyapunovexponents around unique nondegenerate extremal points of any smooth potential, and to a certain class of C2 Szegő cocycles.

We show that for any amenable group \Gamma and any Z\Gamma-module M of type FL with vanishing Euler characteristic, the entropy of the natural \Gamma-action on the Pontryagin dual of M is equal to the L^2-torsion of M. As a particular case, the entropy of the principal algebraic action associated with the module Z\Gamma / Z\Gamma f is equal to the logarithm of the Fuglede-Kadison determinant of f whenever f is a non-zero-divisor in Z\Gamma. This confirms a conjecture of Deninger. As a key step in the proof we provide a general Szeg\H{o}-type approximation theorem for the Fuglede-Kadison determinant on the group von Neumann algebra of an amenable group. As a consequence of the equality between L^2-torsion and entropy, we show that the L^2-torsion of a non-trivial amenable group with finite classifying space vanishes. This was conjectured by Lueck. Finally, we establish a Milnor-Turaev formula for the L^2-torsion of a finite \Delta-acyclic chain complex.

We study the two main types of trajectories of the ABC ow in the near-integrable regime: spiral orbits and edge orbits. The former are helical orbits which are perturbations of similar orbits that exist in the integrable regime, while the latter exist only in the non-integrable regime. We prove existence of ballistic (i.e., linearly growing) spiral orbits by using the contraction mapping principle in the Hamiltonian formulation, and we also nd and analyze ballistic edge orbits. We discuss the relationship of existence of these orbits with questions concerning front propagation in the presence of ows, in particular, the question of linear (i.e., maximal possible) front speed enhancement rate for ABC ows.