No Arabic abstract
We provide explicit, simple, geometric formulas for free involutions rho of Euclidean spheres that are not conjugate to the antipodal involution. Therefore the quotient S^n/rho is a manifold that is homotopically equivalent but not diffeomorphic to RP^n. We use these formulas for constructing explicit non-trivial elements in pi_1 Diff(S^5) and pi_1 Diff(S^13) and to provide explicit formulas for non-cancellation phenomena in group actions.
We construct large families of harmonic morphisms which are holomorphic with respect to Hermitian structures by finding heierarchies of Weierstrass-type representations. This enables us to find new examples of complex-valued harmonic morphisms from Euclidean spaces and spheres.
We introduce a combinatorial method to construct indefinite Ricci-flat metrics on nice nilpotent Lie groups. We prove that every nilpotent Lie group of dimension $leq6$, every nice nilpotent Lie group of dimension $leq7$ and every two-step nilpotent Lie group attached to a graph admits such a metric. We construct infinite families of Ricci-flat nilmanifolds associated to parabolic nilradicals in the simple Lie groups ${rm SL}(n)$, ${rm SO}(p,q)$, ${rm Sp}(n,mathbb R)$. Most of these metrics are shown not to be flat.
We investigate the problem of when big mapping class groups are generated by involutions. Restricting our attention to the class of self-similar surfaces, which are surfaces with self-similar ends space, as defined by Mann and Rafi, and with 0 or infinite genus, we show that, when the set of maximal ends is infinite, then the mapping class groups of these surfaces are generated by involutions, normally generated by a single involution, and uniformly perfect. In fact, we derive this statement as a corollary of the corresponding statement for the homeomorphism groups of these surfaces. On the other hand, among self-similar surfaces with one maximal end, we produce infinitely many examples in which their big mapping class groups are neither perfect nor generated by torsion elements. These groups also do not have the automatic continuity property.
Let k>2. We prove that the cotangent bundles of oriented homotopy (2k-1)-spheres S and S are symplectomorphic only if the classes defined by S and S agree up to sign in the quotient group of oriented homotopy spheres modulo those which bound parallelizable manifolds. We also show that if the connect sum of real projective space of dimension (4k-1) and a homotopy (4k-1)-sphere admits a Lagrangian embedding in complex projective space, then twice the homotopy sphere framed bounds. The proofs build on previous work of Abouzaid and the authors, in combination with a new cut-and-paste argument, which also gives rise to some interesting explicit exact Lagrangian embeddings into plumbings. As another application, we show that there are re-parameterizations of the zero-section in the cotangent bundle of a sphere which are not Hamiltonian isotopic (as maps, rather than as submanifolds) to the original zero-section.
Given a combinatorial $(d-1)$-sphere $S$, to construct a combinatorial $d$-sphere $S^{hspace{.2mm}prime}$ containing $S$, one usually needs some more vertices. Here we consider the question whether we can do one such construction without the help of any additional vertices. We show that this question has affirmative answer when $S$ is a flag sphere, a stacked sphere or a join of spheres. We also consider the question whether we can construct an $n$-vertex combinatorial $d$-sphere containing a given $n$-vertex combinatorial $d$-ball.