Let M be a compact Criemannian manifold of nonpositive curvature1 and with fundamental group . It is well known [8, p. 102] that M is a K (, 1) and thus completely determined up to homotopy type by . In light of this fact it is natural to ask to what extent the riemannian structure of M is determined by the structure of , and the intent of this paper is to demonstrate that rather strong implications of this sort exist. In the case that M has strictly negative curvature, the group is known to be highly noncommutative. Every abelian, in fact, every solvable, subgroup of is cyclic [3]. It is therefore a plausible conjecture that in the nonpositive curvature case, will possess large amounts of commutativity only under special geometric circumstances. We shall show that this is true, that indeed those properties of which involve commutativity have a dramatic reflection in the riemannian structure of M.

We study two dimensional N = (2, 2) Landau-Ginzburg models with tensor valued superfields with the aim of constructing large central charge superconformal field theories which are solvable using large N techniques. We demonstrate the viability of such constructions and motivate the study of anisotropic tensor models. Such theories are a novel deformation of tensor models where we break the continuous symmetries while preserving the large N solvability. Specifically, we examine theories with superpotentials involving tensor contractions chosen to pick out melonic diagrams. The anisotropy is introduced by further biasing individual terms by different coefficients, all of the same order, to retain large N scaling. We carry out a detailed analysis of the resulting low energy fixed point and comment on potential applications to holography. Along the way we also examine gauged versions of the models (with partial anisotropy) and find generically that such theories have a non-compact Higgs branch of vacua.

The Feynman maps introduced first by Truman are examined. The domain considered here consists of the Fresnel-integrable functions in the sense of Albeverio and Hoegh-Krohn; extensions to wider classes of functions will be studied in the following paper. The original definition of the F-maps is slightly modified: we start from the underlying measures on the Hilbert space of paths in order to avoid use of improper integrals. Some new properties of the F-maps are derived. In particular, the dominated convergence theorem is shown to be not valid for the F₁-map (or Feynman integral); this fact is of a certain importance for the classical limit of quantum mechanics.

We construct the boundary phase space in D-dimensional Einstein gravity with a generic given co-dimension one null surface N as the boundary. The associated boundary symmetry algebra is a semi-direct sum of diffeomorphisms of \mathcal{N} and Weyl rescalings. It is generated by D towers of surface charges that are generic functions over \mathcal{N}. These surface charges can be rendered integrable for appropriate slicings of the phase space, provided there is no graviton flux through \mathcal{N}. In one particular slicing of this type, the charge algebra is the direct sum of the Heisenberg algebra and diffeomorphisms of the transverse space, \mathcal{N}_v for any fixed value of the advanced time v. Finally, we introduce null surface expansion- and spin-memories, and discuss associated memory effects that encode the passage of gravitational waves through \mathcal{N}, imprinted in a change of the surface charges.

We propose to incorporate a weighted difference of anisotropic and isotropic total variation (TV) norms into a relaxed formulation of the two phase Mumford-Shah (MS) model for image segmentation. We show results exceeding those obtained by the MS model when using the standard TV norm to regularize partition boundaries. In particular, examples illustrating the qualitative differences between the proposed model and the standard MS one are shown. A fast numerical method is introduced to minimize the proposed model utilizing the difference-of-convex algorithm (DCA) and the primal dual hybrid gradient (PDHG) method.