This note is based on a series of four lectures the author gave at University of Montpellier, September 28-30, 2015. He started with the notion of mass in general relativity, gave a brief review of some known constructions of quasi-local mass, and then discussed the new quasi-local energy and quasi-local mass which Shing-Tung Yau and the author introduced in 2009. At the end, the proof of the positivity of quasi-local energy was sketched and a stability theorem of critical points of quasi-local energy by Po-Ning Chen, Shing-Tung Yau, and the author was discussed

No abstract uploaded!

In this paper we give a proposal for mirrors to (0,2) supersymmetric gauged linear sigma models (GLSMs), for those (0,2) GLSMs which are deformations of (2,2) GLSMs. Specifically, we propose a construction of (0,2) mirrors for (0,2) GLSMs with E terms that are linear and diagonal, reducing to both the Hori-Vafa prescription as well as a recent (2,2) nonabelian mirrors proposal on the (2,2) locus. For the special case of abelian (0,2) GLSMs, two of the authors have previously proposed a systematic construction, which is both simplified and generalized by the proposal here.

Using the degeneration formula for Donaldson-Thomas invariants [L-W,MNOP2], we proved formulae for blowing up a point, simple flops, and extremal transitions.

We prove a formula which relates Euler characteristic of moduli spaces of stable pairs on local K3 surfaces to counting invariants of semistable sheaves on them. Our formula generalizes KawaiYoshioka’s formula for stable pairs with irreducible curve classes to arbitrary curve classes. We also propose a conjectural multiple cover formula of sheaf counting invariants which, combined with our main result, leads to an Euler characteristic version of KatzKlemm-Vafa conjecture for stable pairs.