In this paper, we obtain a class of irreducible Virasoro modules by taking tensor products of the irreducible Virasoro modules $\Omega(\lambda,b)$ with irreducible highest weight modules $V(\theta ,h)$ or with irreducible Virasoro modules $\mathrm{Ind}_{\theta}(N)$ defined in Mazorchuk and Zhao (Selecta Math. (N.S.) 20:839–854,2014). We determine the necessary and sufficient conditions for two such irreducible tensor products to be isomorphic. Then we prove that the tensor product of $\Omega(\lambda,b)$ with a classical Whittaker module is isomorphic to the module $\mathrm{Ind}_{\theta, \lambda}(\mathbb{C}_{\mathbf{m}})$ defined in Mazorchuk and Weisner (Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 142:3695–3703,2014). As a by-product we obtain the necessary and sufficient conditions for the module $\mathrm{Ind}_{\theta, \lambda}(\mathbb{C}_{\mathbf{m}})$ to be irreducible. We also generalize the module $\mathrm{Ind}_{\theta, \lambda}(\mathbb{C}_{\mathbf{m}})$ to $\mathrm{Ind}_{\theta,\lambda}(\mathcal{B}^{(n)}_{\mathbf{s}})$ for any non-negative integer $n$ and use the above results to completely determine when the modules $\mathrm{Ind}_{\theta,\lambda}(\mathcal{B}^{(n)}_{\mathbf{s}})$ are irreducible. The submodules of $\mathrm{Ind}_{\theta,\lambda}(\mathcal{B}^{(n)}_{\mathbf{s}})$ are studied and an open problem in Guo et al. (J. Algebra 387:68–86,2013) is solved. Feigin–Fuchs’ Theorem on singular vectors of Verma modules over the Virasoro algebra is crucial to our proofs in this paper.

We establish local higher integrability estimates for upper gradients of vector-valued parabolic quasi-minimizers in metric measure spaces, satisfying a doubling property and supporting a weak Poincaré inequality.

Given a family of nodal curves, a semistable modification of it is another family made up of curves obtained by inserting chains of rational curves of any given length at certain nodes of certain curves of the original family. We give comparison theorems between torsion-free, rank-1 sheaves in the former family and invertible sheaves in the latter. We apply them to show that there are functorial isomorphisms between the compactifications of relative Jacobians of families of nodal curves constructed through Caporaso’s approach and those constructed through Pandharipande’s approach.

We show that there exist $(d-1)$ -Ahlfors regular compact sets $E \subset\mathbb{R}^{d}$ , $d\geq2$ such that for any $t< d-1$ , we have $$\sup_{T} \frac{\mathcal{H}^{d-1}(E\cap T)}{w(T)^{t}}< \infty $$ where the supremum is over all tubes $T$ with width $w(T) >0$ . This settles a question of T. Orponen. The sets we construct are random Cantor sets, and the method combines geometric and probabilistic estimates on the intersections of these random Cantor sets with affine subspaces.

We show that positive$α$-stable densities are hyperbolically completely monotone if and only if$α$≤1/2. This gives a positive answer to a question raised by L. Bondesson in 1977.