Inthisarticle,weprovideasufficientandnecessaryconditiononparabolic isometries of positive translation lengths on complete visibility CAT(0) spaces. One of the consequences is that each parabolic isometry of a complete simply connected visibility manifold of nonpositive sectional curvature has zero translation length. Applications on the geometry of open negatively curved manifolds will also be discussed.

The universal Teichmu¨ller space is an infinitely dimensional generalization of the classical Teichmu¨ller space of Riemann surfaces. It carries a natural Hilbert structure, on which one can define a natural Riemannian metric, the Weil-Petersson metric. In this paper we investigate the Weil-Petersson Riemannian curvature operator ˜ Q of the universal Teichmu¨ller space with the Hilbert structure, and prove the following: (i) ˜ Q is non-positive definite. (ii) ˜ Q is a bounded operator. (iii) ˜ Q is not compact; the set of the spectra of ˜ Q is not discrete. As an application, we show that neither the Quaternionic hyperbolic space nor the Cayley plane can be totally geodesically immersed in the universal Teichmu¨ller space endowed with the Weil-Petersson metric.

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We prove that an isoparametric hypersurface with four principal curvatures and multiplicity pair (7,8) is either the one constructed by Ozeki and Takeuchi, or one of the two constructed by Ferus, Karcher, and Mu¨nzner. This completes the classification of isoparametric hypersurfaces in spheres that ´E. Cartan initiated in the late 1930s.