We consider two-dimensional critical bond percolation. Conditioned on the existence of an open circuit in an annulus, we show that the ratio of the expected size of the shortest open circuit to the expected size of the innermost circuit tends to zero as the side length of the annulus tends to infinity, the aspect ratio remaining fixed. The same proof yields a similar result for the lowest open crossing of a rectangle. In this last case, we answer a question of Kesten and Zhang by showing in addition that the ratio of the length of the shortest crossing to the length of the lowest tends to zero in probability. This suggests that the chemical distance in critical percolation is given by an exponent strictly smaller than that of the lowest path.

In this paper, we prove the global rigidity of sphere packings on 3-dimensional manifolds. This is a 3-dimensional analogue of the rigidity theorem of Andreev-Thurston and was conjectured by Cooper and Rivin. We also prove a global rigidity result using a combinatorial scalar curvature introduced by Ge and the author.

No abstract uploaded!

Mean curvature ows of hypersurfaces have been extensively studied and there are various dierent approaches and many beautiful results. However, relatively little is known about mean curvature ows of submanifolds of higher codimensions. This notes starts with some basic materials on submanifold geometry, and then introduces mean curvature ows in general dimensions and co-dimensions. The related techniques in the so called \blow-up" analysis are also discussed. At the end, we present some global existence and convergence results for mean curvature ows of two-dimensional surfaces in four-dimensional ambient spaces.

The standard Yee's scheme for the Maxwell eigenvalue problems places the discrete electric field variable at the midpoints of the edges of the grid cells. It performs well when the permittivity is a scalar field. However, when the permittivity is a Hermitian full tensor filed it would generate un-physical complex eigenvalues or frequencies. In this paper, we propose a finite element method which can be interpreted as a modified Yee's scheme to overcome this difficulty. This interpretation enables us to create a fast FFT eigensolver that can compute very effectively the band structure of the anisotropic photonic crystal with SC and FCC lattices. Furthermore, we overcome the usual large null space associated with the Maxwell eigenvalue problem by deriving a null-space free discrete eigenvalue problem which involves a crucial Hermitian positive definite linear system to be solved in each of the iteration steps. It is demonstrated that the CG method without preconditioning converges in 37 iterations even when the dimension of the matrix is as large as $5,184,000$.