In [W], Witten considered the indices of elliptic operators on the free loop space CM of a spin manifold M. In particular the index of the formal signature operator on the loop space is exactly the elliptic genus of Landweber-Stong-Ochanine [LS],[O]. Motivated by physics, Witten made the conjectures about the rigidity of these elliptic operators which say that their 51-equivariant indices on M are independent of g G Sl. See [L] for the early history of the subject.

We use adiabatic limits to study foliated manifolds. The Bott connection naturally shows up as the adiabatic limit of Levi-Civita connections. As an application, we then construct certain natural elliptic operators associated to the foliation and present a direct geometric proof of a vanshing theorem of Connes [Co], which extends the Lichnerowicz vanishing theorem [L] to foliated manifolds with spin leaves, for what we call almost Riemannian foliations. Several new vanishing theorems are also proved by using our method.

In this paper we investigate the convergence for the mean curvature flow of closed submanifolds with arbitrary codimension in space forms. Particularly, we prove that the mean curvature flow deforms a closed submanifold satisfying a pinching condition in a hyperbolic space form to a round point in finite time.

This paper contains several results concerning circle action on almost-complex and smooth manifolds. More precisely, we show that, for an almost-complex manifold M^{2mn} (resp. a smooth manifold M^{2mn} ), if there exists a partition M^{2mn} of weight M^{2mn} such that the Chern number M^{2mn} (resp. Pontrjagin number M^{2mn} ) is nonzero, then\emph {any} circle action on M^{2mn} (resp. M^{2mn} ) has at least M^{2mn} fixed points. When an even-dimensional smooth manifold M^{2mn} admits a semi-free action with isolated fixed points, we show that M^{2mn} bounds, which generalizes a well-known fact in the free case. We also provide a topological obstruction, in terms of the first Chern class, to the existence of semi-free circle action with\emph {nonempty} isolated fixed points on almost-complex manifolds. The main ingredients of our proofs are Bott's residue formula and rigidity theorem.

We define orbifold elliptic genus for general orbifolds which generalizes the definition of Borisov and Libgober, and prove their rigidity property.