We argue that G_2 manifolds for M-theory admitting string theory Calabi-Yau duals are fibered by coassociative submanifolds. Dual theories are constructed using the moduli space of M-five-brane fibers as target space. Mirror symmetry and various string and M-theory dualities involving G_2 manifolds may be incorporated into this framework. To give some examples, we construct two non-compact manifolds with G_2 structures: one with a K3 fibration, and one with a torus fibration and a metric of G_2 holonomy. Kaluza-Klein reduction of the latter solution gives abelian BPS monopoles in 3+ 1 dimensions.

We consider the Cauchy problem for the massive Dirac equation in the non-extreme Kerr-Newman geometry outside the event horizon. We derive an integral representation for the Dirac propagator involving the solutions of the ODEs which arise in Chandrasekhar's separation of variables. It is proved that for initial data in L infinity loc near the event horizon with L 2 decay at infinity, the probability of the Dirac particle to be in any compact region of space tends to zero as t goes to infinity. This means that the Dirac particle must either disappear in the black hole or escape to infinity.

A D5 elliptic fibration is a fibration whose generic fiber is modeled by the complete intersection of two quadric surfaces in P3. They provide simple examples of elliptic fibrations admitting a rich spectrum of singular fibers (not all on the list of Kodaira) without introducing singularities in the total space of the fibration and therefore avoiding a discussion of their resolutions. We study systematically the fiber geometry of such fibrations using Segre symbols and compute several topological invariants.

The aim of this paper is to develop a mathematical framework for opto-elastography. In opto-elastography, a mechanical perturbation of the medium produces a decorrelation of optical speckle patterns due to the displacements of optical scatterers. To model this, we consider two optically random media, with the second medium obtained by shifting the first medium in some local region. We derive the radiative transfer equation for the cross-correlation of the wave fields in the media. Then we derive its diffusion approximation. In both the radiative transfer and the diffusion regimes, we relate the correlation of speckle patterns to the solutions of the radiative transfer and the diffusion equations. We present numerical simulations based on our model which are in agreement with recent experimental measurements.

We describe the applications of localization methods, in particular the functorial localization formula, in the proofs of several conjectures from string theory. Functorial localization formula pushes the computations on complicated moduli spaces to simple moduli spaces. It is a key technique in the proof of the general mirror formulas, the proof of the Hori-Vafa formulas for explicit expressions of basic hypergeometric series of homogeneous manifolds, the proof of the Mario-Vafa formula, its generalizations to two partition analogue. We will also discuss our development of the mathematical theory of topological vertex and simple localization proofs of the ELSV formula and Witten conjecture.