Macroscopic scalar curvature and codimension 2 width

Codimension Two Branes and Distributional Curvature

In general relativity, there is a well-developed formalism for working with the approximation that a gravitational source is concentrated on a shell, or codimension one surface. By contrast, there are obstacles to concentrating sources on surfaces that have a higher co-dimension, for example, a string in a spacetime with dimension greater than or equal to four. Here it is shown that, by giving ...

Mean Curvature Flows in Higher Codimension

The mean curvature flow is an evolution process under which a sub-manifold deforms in the direction of its mean curvature vector. The hypersurface case has been much studied since the eighties. Recently, several theorems on regularity, global existence and convergence of the flow in various ambient spaces and codimensions were proved. We shall explain the results obtained as well as the techniq...

Positive Scalar Curvature and Surgery

Positive Scalar Curvature

One of the striking initial applications of the Seiberg-Witten invariants was to give new obstructions to the existence of Riemannian metrics of positive scalar curvature on 4– manifolds. The vanishing of the Seiberg–Witten invariants of a manifold admitting such a metric may be viewed as a non-linear generalization of the classic conditions [12, 11] derived from the Dirac operator. If a manifo...

PRESCRIBING SCALAR CURVATURE ON Sn

on S for n ≥ 3. In the case R is rotationally symmetric, the well-known Kazdan-Warner condition implies that a necessary condition for (1) to have a solution is: R > 0 somewhere and R′(r) changes signs. Then, (a) is this a sufficient condition? (b) If not, what are the necessary and sufficient conditions? These have been open problems for decades. In Chen & Li, 1995, we gave question (a) a nega...