We realize the moduli spaces of cubic fourfolds with specified group actions as arithmetic quotients of complex hyperbolic balls or type IV symmetric domains, and study their compactifications. We prove the geometric (GIT) compactifications are naturally isomorphic to the Hodge theoretic (Looijenga, in many cases Baily–Borel) compactifications. The key ingredients of the proof are the global Torelli theorem by Voisin, the characterization of the image of the period map given by Looijenga and Laza independently, and the functoriality of Looijenga compactifications proved in the Appendix.

1. INDEX THEORY, ELLIPTIC CURVES AND LOOP GROUPS One can look at elliptic genus from several different points of view; from index theory, from representation theory of Kac-Moody affine Lie algebras or from the theory of elliptic functions and modular forms. Each of them shows us some quite different interesting features of ellitic genus. On the other hand we can also combine the forces of these three different mathematical fields to derive many interesting results in topology such as rigidity, divisibility and vanishing of topological invariants..

We establish a generic vanishing theorem for surfaces in characteristic p that lift to p and use it for classification of surfaces of general type with Euler characteristic p and large Albanese dimension.

For ordinary flops, the correspondence defined by the graph closure is shown to give equivalence of Chow motives and to preserve the Poincaré pairing. In the case of simple ordinary flops, this correspondence preserves the big quantum cohomology ring after an analytic continuation over the extended Kähler moduli space. For Mukai flops, it is shown that the birational map for the local models is deformation equivalent to isomorphisms. This implies that the birational map induces isomorphisms on the full quantum rings and all the quantum corrections attached to the extremal ray vanish.

We give an effective algorithm to compute the Euler characteristics χ(\mbar_{1,n}, \otimes_{i=1}^n L_i^{d_i}). In addition, we give a simple proof of Pandharipande's vanishing theorem H^j (\mbar_{0,n}, \otimes_{i=1}^n L_i^{d_i})=0 for j≥1,di≥0.