We give a description of the completion of the manifold of all smooth Riemannian metrics on a fixed smooth, closed, finitedimensional, orientable manifold with respect to a natural metric called the L2 metric. The primary motivation for studying this problem comes from Teichm¨uller theory, where similar considerations lead to a completion of the well-known Weil-Petersson metric. We give an application of the main theorem to the completions of Teichm¨uller space with respect to a class of metrics that generalize the Weil-Petersson metric.

This paper extends our earlier results to higher dimensions using a different approach, based on the rigidity of complex structures on certain domains. We prove a “low energy” result in all dimensions, in the sense that if normalized energy in a large ball is small enough, then the normalized energy in any interior ball must also be small.

We obtain an estimate for the volumes of neighborhoods of sets of large curvature in three-dimensional K¨ahler-Einstein manifolds. The key technical step is to prove that a version of monotonicity for L2 energy holds as long as the underlying region does not “carry homology” (in the sense that the normalized energy in a ball controls the normalized energy in an interior ball).

A Riemannian or Finsler metric on a compact manifoldM gives rise to a length function on the free loop space M, whose critical points are the closed geodesics in the given metric. If X is a homology class on M, the “minimax” critical level cr(X) is a critical value. Let M be a sphere of dimension > 2, and fix a metric g and a coefficient field G. We prove that the limit as deg(X) goes to infinity of cr(X)/ deg(X) exists. We call this limit = (M, g,G) the global mean frequency of M. As a consequence we derive resonance statements for closed geodesics on spheres; in particular either all homology on  of sufficiently high degreee lies hanging on closed geodesics of mean frequency (length/average index) , or there is a sequence of infinitely many closed geodesics whose mean frequencies converge to . The proof uses the ChasSullivan product and results of Goresky-Hingston [7].

We consider minimal surfaces M which are complete, embedded, and have finite total curvature in R3, and bounded, entire solutions with finite Morse index of the Allen-Cahn equation
u+ f(u) = 0 in R3. Here f = −W0 with W bi-stable and balanced, for instance W(u) = 1 4 (1 − u2)2. We assume that M has m  2 ends, and additionally that M is non-degenerate, in the sense that its bounded Jacobi fields are all originated from rigid motions (this is known for instance for a Catenoid and for the Costa-Hoffman- Meeks surface of any genus). We prove that for any small  > 0, the Allen-Cahn equation has a family of bounded solutions depending on m − 1 parameters distinct from rigid motions, whose level sets are embedded surfaces lying close to the blown-up surface M := −1M, with ends possibly diverging logarithmically from M. We prove that these solutions are L1-non-degenerate up to rigid motions, and find that their Morse index coincides with the index of the minimal surface. Our construction suggests parallels of De Giorgi conjecture for general bounded solutions of finite Morse index.