This paper gives a new and direct construction of the multi-prime big de Rham–Witt complex, which is defined for every commutative and unital ring; the original construction by Madsen and myself relied on the adjoint functor theorem and accordingly was very indirect. The construction given here also corrects the 2-torsion which was not quite correct in the original version. The new construction is based on the theory of modules and derivations over a$λ$-ring which is developed first. The main result in this first part of the paper is that the universal derivation of a$λ$-ring is given by the universal derivation of the underlying ring together with an additional structure depending directly on the$λ$-ring structure in question. In the case of the ring of big Witt vectors, this additional structure gives rise to divided Frobenius operators on the module of Kähler differentials. It is the existence of these divided Frobenius operators that makes the new construction of the big de Rham–Witt complex possible. It is further shown that the big de Rham–Witt complex behaves well with respect to étale maps, and finally, the big de Rham–Witt complex of the ring of integers is explicitly evaluated.

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We study Thurston’s Lipschitz and curve metrics, as well as the arc metric on the Teichmüller space of one-hold tori equipped with complete hyperbolic metrics with boundary holonomy of fixed length. We construct natural Lipschitz maps between two surfaces equipped with such hyperbolic metrics that generalize Thurston’s stretch maps and prove the following: (1) On the Teichmüller space of the torus with one boundary component, the Lipschitz and the curve metrics coincide and define a geodesic metric on this space. (2) On the same space, the arc and the curve metrics coincide when the length of the boundary component is ≤4arcsinh(1), but differ when the boundary length is large. We further apply our stretch map generalization to construct novel Thurston geodesics on the Teichmüller spaces of closed hyperbolic surfaces, and use these geodesics to show that the sum-symmetrization of the Thurston metric fails to exhibit Gromov hyperbolicity.

We introduce a quantum trace map for an ideally triangulated hyperbolic knot complement S^3∖K. The map assigns a quantum operator to each element of Kauffmann Skein module of the 3-manifold. The quantum operator lives in a module generated by products of quantized edge parameters of the ideal triangulation modulo some equivalence relations determined by gluing equations. Combining the quantum map with a state-integral model of SL(2,C) Chern-Simons theory, one can define perturbative invariants of knot K in the knot complement whose leading part is determined by its complex hyperbolic length. We then conjecture that the perturbative invariants determine an asymptotic expansion of the Jones polynomial for a link composed of K and K. We propose the explicit quantum trace map for figure-eight knot complement and confirm the length conjecture up to the second order in the asymptotic expansion both numerically and analytically.