Every smooth cubic plane curve has 9 flex points and 27 sextatic points. We study the following question asked by Farb: Is it true that the known algebraic structures give all the possible ways to continuously choose n distinct points on every smooth cubic plane curve, for each given positive integer n? We give an affirmative answer to the question when n=9 and 18 (the smallest open cases), and a negative answer for infinitely many n's.

Let X_\Sigma be a toric surface and let (\check {X}, W) be its Landau-Ginzburg (LG) mirror where W is the Hori-Vafa potential as shown in their preprint. We apply asymptotic analysis to study the extended deformation theory of the LG model (\check {X}, W), and prove that semi-classical limits of Fourier modes of a specific class of Maurer-Cartan solutions naturally give rise to tropical disks in X with Maslov index 0 or 2, the latter of which produces a universal unfolding of W. For X = \mathbb{P}^2, our construction reproduces Gross' perturbed potential W_n [Adv. Math. 224 (2010), pp. 169-245] which was proven to be the universal unfolding of W written in canonical coordinates. We also explain how the extended deformation theory can be used to reinterpret the jumping phenomenon of W_n across walls of the scattering diagram formed by Maslov index 0 tropical disks originally observed by Gross in the same work (in the case of X = \mathbb{P}^2).

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In this article we propose a geometric description of Arthur packets for p-adic groups using vanishing cycles of perverse sheaves. Our approach is inspired by the 1992 book by Adams, Barbasch and Vogan on the Langlands classification of admissible representations of real groups and follows the direction indicated by Vogan in his 1993 paper on the Langlands correspondence. Using vanishing cycles, we introduce and study a functor from the category of equivariant perverse sheaves on the moduli space of certain Langlands parameters to local systems on the regular part of the conormal bundle for this variety. In this article we establish the main properties of this functor and show that it plays the role of microlocalization in the work of Adams, Barbasch and Vogan. We use this to define ABV-packets for pure rational forms of p-adic groups and propose a geometric description of the transfer coefficients that appear in Arthur's main local result in the endoscopic classification of representations. This article includes conjectures modelled on Vogan's work, especially the prediction that Arthur packets are ABV-packets for p-adic groups. We gather evidence for these conjectures by verifying them in numerous examples.

The study of affine Deligne-Lusztig varieties originally arose from arithmetic geometry, but many problems on affine Deligne-Lusztig varieties are purely Lie-theoretic in nature. This survey deals with recent progress on several important problems on affine Deligne-Lusztig varieties. The emphasis is on the Lie-theoretic aspect, while some connections and applications to arithmetic geometry will also be mentioned.