We give an explicit construction of a family of lattices in PU (1, 2) originally constructed by Livné. Following Thurston, we construct these lattices as the modular group of certain Euclidean cone metrics on the sphere. We give connections between these groups and other groups of complex hyperbolic isometries.

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Let$M$be a connected, noncompact, complete Riemannian manifold, consider the operator$L=Δ+∇V$for some$V∈C$^{2}(M) with exp[$V$] integrable with respect to the Riemannian volume element. This paper studies the existence of the spectral gap of$L$. As a consequence of the main result, let ϱ be the distance function from a point o, then the spectral gap exists provided lim_{ϱ→∞}sup$L$_{ϱ<0}while the spectral gap does not exist if o is a pole and lim_{ϱ→∞}inf$L$_{ϱ≥0}. Moreover, the elliptic operators on$R$^{$d$}are also studied.

We investigate whether a Stein manifold$M$which allows proper holomorphic embedding into ℂ^{$n$}can be embedded in such a way that the image contains a given discrete set of points and in addition follow arbitrarily close to prescribed tangent directions in a neighbourhood of the discrete set. The infinitesimal version was proven by Forstnerič to be always possible. We give a general positive answer if the dimension of$M$is smaller than$n$/2 and construct counterexamples for all other dimensional relations. The obstruction we use in these examples is a certain hyperbolicity condition.

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