In this paper, we study the question of which compact manifolds admit a metric with positive scalar curvature. Scalar curvature is perhaps the weakest invariant among all the well-known invariants constructed from the curvature tensor. It measures the deviation of the Riemannian volume of the geodesic ball from the euclidean volume of the geodesic ball. As a result, it does not tell us much of the behavior of the geodesics in the manifold. Therefore it was remarkable that in 1963, Lichnerowicz [i] was able to prove the theorem that on a compact spin manifold with positive scalar curvature, there is no harmonic spinor. Applying

In this paper we compute spaces of chiral operators in general two-dimensional (0,2) nonlinear sigma models, both in theories twistable to the A/2 or B/2 model, as well as in non-twistable theories, and apply them to check recent duality conjectures. The fact that in a nonlinear sigma model, the Fock vacuum can act as a section of a line bundle on the target space plays a crucial role in our (0,2) computations, so we begin with a review of this property. We also take this opportunity to show how even in (2,2) theories, the Fock vacuum encodes in this way choices of target space spin structures, and discuss how such choices enter the A and B model topological field theories. We then compute chiral operators in general (0,2) nonlinear sigma models, and apply them to the recent Gadde-Gukov-Putrov triality proposal, which says that certain triples of (0,2) GLSMs should RG flow to nontrivial IR fixed points. We find that different UV theories in the same proposed universality class do not necessarily have the same space of chiral operators – but, the mismatched operators do not contribute to elliptic genera and are in non-integrable representations of the proposed IR affine symmetry groups, suggesting that the mismatched states become massive along RG flow. We find this state matching in examples not only of different geometric phases of the same GLSMs, but also in phases of different GLSMs, indirectly verifying the triality proposal, and giving a clean demonstration that (0,2) chiral rings are not topologically protected. We also check proposals for enhanced IR affine E6 symmetries in one such model, verifying that (matching) chiral states in phases of corresponding GLSMs transform as 27’s, \bar{27}’s.

We prove that the chordal contour lines of the discrete Gaussian free field converge to forms of SLE(4). Specifically, there is a constant λ > 0 such that when$h$is an interpolation of the discrete Gaussian free field on a Jordan domain—with boundary values −λ on one boundary arc and λ on the complementary arc—the zero level line of$h$joining the endpoints of these arcs converges to SLE(4) as the domain grows larger. If instead the boundary values are −$a$< 0 on the first arc and b > 0 on the complementary arc, then the convergence is to SLE(4;$a$/λ - 1,$b$/λ - 1), a variant of SLE(4).

Centroidal Voronoi tessellation (CVT) is a special type of Voronoi diagram such that the generating point of each Voronoi cell is also its center of mass. The CVT has broad applications in computer graphics, such as meshing, stippling, sampling, etc. The existing methods for computing CVTs on meshes either require a global parameterization or compute it in the restricted sense (that is, intersecting a 3D CVT with the surface). Therefore, these approaches often fail on models with complicated geometry and/or topology. This paper presents two intrinsic algorithms for computing CVT on triangle meshes. The first algorithm adopts the Lloyd framework, which iteratively moves the generator of each geodesic Voronoi diagram to its mass center. Based on the discrete exponential map, our method can efficiently compute the Riemannian center and the center of mass for any geodesic Voronoi diagram. The second algorithm uses the L-BFGS method to accelerate the intrinsic CVT computation. Thanks to the intrinsic feature, our methods are independent of the embedding space, and work well for models with arbitrary topology and complicated geometry, where the existing extrinsic approaches often fail. The promising experimental results show the advantages of our method.

In these notes, we provide an introduction to the hemisphere partition function of 2d (2, 2) supersymmetric gauge theories, and discuss its relation to the “D-brane central charge” which were studied in superstring theory, in 2d supersymmetric quantum field theory, and in topological string theory. We also discuss relation to “macroscopic loop” in matrix models. They are mostly reviews of the work by the authors, but contains some new results such as the partition function for a rotated supersymmetry as well as the differential equations.