THE MAIN PURPOSE of this paper is to give a simple and unified new proof of the Witten rigidity theorems, which were conjectured by Witten and first proved by Taubes [25], Bott-Taubes [S], Hirzebruch Cl23 and Krichever [15]. Our proof shows that the modular invariance, which is the intrinsic symmetry of elliptic genera, actually implies their rigidity. Some new properties of elliptic genera and their relationships with theta-functions are also discussed. We remark that our proof makes essential uses of the new feature of loop groups and loop spaces, the modular invariance. We note that, with the help of the modular group, we can catch the topological information on loop space by simply working on finite-dimensional manifold. By developing this idea further, in [21] we have proved the rigidity of the Dirac operator on loop space twisted by higher-level loop group representations, while the Witten ridigity theorems are the special cases of level 1. Many topological vanishing theorems are also derived in [21] by refining the argument in this paper, especially an &-vanishing theorem for loop space. In [19] modular invariance is used again to establish a general miraculous cancellation formula, relating the Hirzebruch L-form to certain twisted &-forms, which has many interesting topological results as consequences. These results were announced in [20].

In this paper, we continue our study of the canonical metrics on the moduli space of curves. We first prove the bounded geometry of the Ricci and perturbed Ricci metrics. By carefully choosing the pertubation constant and by studying the asymptotics, we show that the Ricci and holomorphic sectional curvatures of the perturbed Ricci metric are bounded from above and below by negative constants. Based on our understanding of the KhlerEinstein metric, we show that the logarithmic cotangent bundle over the DeligneMumford moduli space is stable with respect to the canonical polarization. Finally, in the last section, we prove the strongly bounded geometry of the KhlerEinstein metric by using the KhlerRicci flow and a priori estimates of the complex Monge-Ampere equation.

One of the main purposes of this paper is to understand the geometry of the moduli and the Teichmller spaces of Riemann surfaces. The most interesting results we have in this paper are the detailed understanding of two new complete Khler metrics with nice properties and the KhlerEinstein metric on the Teichmller and the moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces. The two new metrics, the Ricci metric and the perturbed Ricci metric, are naturally defined as the negative Ricci curvature of the WeilPetersson metric and a combination of it with the WeilPetersson metric. We prove that these new metrics and the KhlerEinstein metric on the Teichmller and moduli spaces all have Poincar type boundary behavior, and further, in [7], we prove that they all have bounded geometry. Note that the KhlerEinstein metric is the key link between the differential geometric and algebraic geometric aspects of these spaces

We study the asymptotic of the Bergman kernel of the spinc Dirac operator on high tensor powers of a line bundle.

We have developed a mathematical theory of the topological vertexa theory that was originally proposed by M Aganagic, A Klemm, M Mario and C Vafa on effectively computing GromovWitten invariants of smooth toric CalabiYau threefolds derived from duality between open string theory of smooth CalabiYau threefolds and ChernSimons theory on three-manifolds.