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.

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.

In this article we study a conjecture of Geiss-Leclerc-Schröer, which is an analogue of a classical conjecture of Lusztig in the Weyl group case. It concerns the relation between canonical basis and semi-canonical basis through the characteristic cycles. We formulate an approach to this conjecture and prove it for type quiver. In the general type A case, we reduce the conjecture to show that certain nearby cycles have vanishing Euler characteristic.

We analyze the asymptotic behavior of certain twisted orbital integrals arising from the study of affine Deligne-Lusztig varieties. The main tools include the Base Change Fundamental Lemma and q-analogues of the Kostant partition functions. As an application we prove a conjecture of Miaofen Chen and Xinwen Zhu, relating the set of irreducible components of an affine Deligne-Lusztig variety modulo the action of the σ-centralizer group to the Mirkovic-Vilonen basis of a certain weight space of a representation of the Langlands dual group.

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