Motivated by the possible characterization of Sasakian manifolds in terms of twistor forms, we give the complete classification of compact Riemannian manifolds carrying a Killing vector field whose covariant derivative (viewed as a 2–form) is a twistor form.

Let X → B be a proper flat morphism between smooth quasiprojective varieties of relative dimension n, and L → X a line bundle which is ample on the fibers. We establish formulas for the first two terms in the Knudsen-Mumford expansion for det(πLk) in terms of Deligne pairings of L and the relative canonical bundle K. This generalizes the theorem of Deligne [1], which holds for families of relative dimension one. As a corollary, we show that when X is smooth, the line bundle η associated to X → B, which was introduced in Phong-Sturm [12], coincides with the CM bundle defined by Paul-Tian [10, 11]. In a second and third corollaries, we establish asymptotics for the K-energy along Bergman rays generalizing the formulas obtained in [11].

From any 4-dimensional oriented handlebody X without 3- and 4-handles and with b2  1, we construct arbitrary many compact Stein 4-manifolds that are mutually homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic to each other, so that their topological invariants (their fundamental groups, homology groups, boundary homology groups, and intersection forms) coincide with those of X. We also discuss the induced contact structures on their boundaries. Furthermore, for any smooth 4-manifold pair (Z, Y ) such that the complement Z − int Y is a handlebody without 3- and 4-handles and with b2  1, we construct arbitrary many exotic embeddings of a compact 4-manifold Y 0 into Z, such that Y 0 has the same topological invariants as Y .

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Let$M$be a smooth manifold and$V$a Euclidean space. Let $ \overline{{{\text{Emb}}}} $ ($M$,$V$) be the homotopy fiber of the map Emb($M$,$V$) → Imm($M$,$V$). This paper is about the rational homology of $ \overline{{{\text{Emb}}}} $ ($M$,$V$). We study it by applying embedding calculus and orthogonal calculus to the bifunctor ($M$,$V$)↦$HQ$∧ $ \overline{{{\text{Emb}}}} $ ($M$,$V$)_{+}. Our main theorem states that if $$ \dim V \geqslant 2{\text{ED}}{\left( M \right)} + 1 $$ (where ED($M$) is the embedding dimension of$M$), the Taylor tower in the sense of orthogonal calculus (henceforward called “the orthogonal tower”) of this functor splits as a product of its layers. Equivalently, the rational homology spectral sequence associated with the tower collapses at$E$^{1}. In the case of knot embeddings, this spectral sequence coincides with the Vassiliev spectral sequence. The main ingredients in the proof are embedding calculus and Kontsevich's theorem on the formality of the little balls operad. We write explicit formulas for the layers in the orthogonal tower of the functor $$ HQ \wedge \overline{{{\text{Emb}}}} {\left( {M,V} \right)}_{ + }. $$ The formulas show, in particular, that the (rational) homotopy type of the layers of the orthogonal tower is determined by the (rational) homotopy type of$M$. This, together with our rational splitting theorem, implies that, under the above assumption on codimension, rational homology equivalences of manifolds induce isomorphisms between the rational homology groups of $ \overline{{{\text{Emb}}}} $ (–,V).