The presence of a massive scalar field near a Kerr black hole is known to produce instabilities associated with bound superradiant modes. In this paper we show that for massive fermions, rather than inducing an instability, the bound superradiant modes condense and form a Fermi sea which extends well outside the ergosphere. The shape of this Fermi sea in phase space and various other properties are analytically computed in the semiclassical WKB approximation. The low energy effective theory near the black hole is described by ripples in the Fermi surface. Expressions are derived for their dispersion relation and the effective force on particles which venture into the sea.

The cosmological observations provide a strong evidence that there is a positive cosmological constant in our universe and thus the spacetime is asymptotical de Sitter space. The conjecture of gravity as the weakest force in the asymptotical dS space leads to a lower bound on the U(1) gauge coupling $g$, or equivalently, the positive cosmological constant gets an upper bound $\rho_V \leq g^2 M_p^4$ in order that the U(1) gauge theory can survive in four dimensions. This result has a simple explanation in string theory, i.e. the string scale $\sqrt{\alpha '}$ should not be greater than the size of the cosmic horizon. Our proposal in string theory can be generalized to U(N) gauge theory and gives a guideline to the microscopic explanation of the de Sitter entropy. The similar results are also obtained in the asymptotical anti-de Sitter space.

We consider N= 2 superconformal field theory with following properties: a) Coulomb branch operators have fractional scaling dimensions, b) there are exact marginal deformations. The weakly coupled gauge theory descriptions are found by decomposing 3d mirror into different components, and different decompositions correspond to different duality frames. The gauge theory is formed by gauging Argyres-Douglas matter, and we write down all duality frames for several classes with infinite sequence of theories.

It is argued that every Calabi-Yau manifold <i>X</i> with a mirror <i>Y</i> admits a family of supersymmetric toroidal 3-cycles. Moreover the moduli space of such cycles together with their flat connections is precisely the space <i>Y</i>. The mirror transformation is equivalent to <i>T</i>-duality on the 3-cycles. The geometry of moduli space is addressed in a general framework. Several examples are discussed.

We apply quantum gravitational results to spatially unbounded Friedmann universes and try to answer some questions related to dark energy, dark matter, inflation and the missing antimatter.