Compactifications of symmetric spaces have been constructed by different methods for various applications. One application is to provide the so-called rational boundary components which can be used to compactify locally symmetric spaces. In this paper, we construct many compactifications of symmetric spaces using a uniform method, which is motivated by the Borel-Serre compact- ification of locally symmetric spaces. Besides unifying compactifications of both symmetric and locally symmetric spaces, this uniform construction allows one to compare and relate easily different compactifications, to extend the group action continuously to boundaries of compactifications, and to clarify the structure of the boundaries.

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The Ward equation, also called the modified 2+1 chiral model,is obtained by a dimension reduction and a gauge fixing from the self-dual Yang-Mills field equation on R2,2. It has a Lax pair and is an integrable system. Ward constructed solitons whose ex- tended solutions have distinct simple poles. He also used a limiting method to construct 2-solitons whose extended solutions have a double pole. Ioannidou and Zakrzewski, and Anand constructed more soliton solutions whose extended solutions have a double or triple pole. Some of the main results of this paper are: (i) We construct algebraic B¨acklund transformations (BTs) that generate new solutions of the Ward equation from a given one by an algebraic method. (ii) We use an order k limiting method and algebraic BTs to construct explicit Ward solitons, whose extended solutions have arbitrary poles and multiplicities. (iii) We prove that our construction gives all solitons of the Ward equation explicitly and the entries of Ward solitons must be rational functions in x, y and t. (iv) Since stationary Ward solitons are unitons, our method also gives an explicit construction of all k-unitons from finite sequences of rational maps from C to Cn.

We consider contracting and expanding curvature flows in $\Ss$. When the flow hypersurfaces are strictly convex we establish a relation between the contracting hypersurfaces and the expanding hypersurfaces which is given by the Gau{\ss} map. The contracting hypersurfaces shrink to a point $x_0$ while the expanding hypersurfaces converge to the equator of the hemisphere $\mc H(-x_0)$. After rescaling, by the same scale factor, the rescaled hypersurfaces converge to the unit spheres with centers $x_0$ \resp $-x_0$ exponentially fast in $C^\un(\Ss[n])$.

We quantize the interaction of gravity with a Yang-Mills and Higgs field using canonical quantization. Similar to the approach in a previous paper we discard the Wheeler-DeWitt equation and express the Hamilton constraint by the evolution equation of the mean curvature of the hypersurfaces in the foliation defined by the Hamiltonian setting. Expressing the time derivative of the mean curvature with the help of the Poisson brackets the canonical quantization of this equation leads to a wave equation in $Q=(0,\infty)\times \so$, where $\so$ is one of the Cauchy hypersurfaces in the Hamiltonian setting. The wave equation describes the interaction of an arbitrary Riemannian metric in $\so$ and a given Yang-Mills and Higgs field. If the metric is complete $Q$ is globally hyperbolic. In case $\so$ is compact we also prove a spectral resolution of the wave equation and establish sufficient conditions guaranteeing a mass gap.