There have been many attempts to define the notion of quasilocal mass for a spacelike 2-surface in spacetime by the Hamilton-Jacobi analysis. The essential difficulty in this approach is to identify the right choice of the background configuration to be subtracted from the physical Hamiltonian. Quasilocal mass should be nonnegative for surfaces in general spacetime and zero for surfaces in flat spacetime. In this letter, we propose a new definition of gauge-independent quasilocal mass and prove that it has the desired properties.

We show that Thurston’s skinning maps of Teichmüller space have finite fibers. The proof centers around a study of two subvarieties of the $${{\rm SL}_2(\mathbb{C})}$$ character variety of a surface—one associated with complex projective structures, and the other associated with a 3-manifold. Using the Morgan–Shalen compactification of the character variety and author’s results on holonomy limits of complex projective structures, we show that these subvarieties have only a discrete set of intersections.

In this paper we prove some results concerning stability of hypersurfaces in the four dimensional Euclidean space with zero scalar curvature. First we prove there is no complete stable hypersurface with zero scalar curvature, polynomial growth of integral of the mean curvature, and with the Gauss-Kronecker curvature bounded away from zero. We conclude this paper giving a sufficient condition for a regular domain to be stable in terms of the mean and the Gauss-Kronecker curvatures of the hypersurface and the radius of the smallest extrinsic ball which contains the domain.

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Topological qauntum field theory(TQFT) is a very powerful theoretical tool to study topological phases and phase transitions. In 2+1D, it is well known that the Chern-Simons theory captures all the universal topological data of topological phases, e.g., quasi-particle braiding statistics, chiral central charge and even provides us a deep insight for the nature of topological phase transitions. Recently, topological phases of quantum matter are also intensively studied in 3+1D and it has been shown that loop like excitation obeys the so-called three-loop-braiding statistics. In this paper, we will try to establish a TQFT framework to understand the quantum statistics of particle and loop like excitation in 3+1D. We will focus on Abelian topological phases for simplicity, however, the general framework developed here is not limited to Abelian topological phases.