Generalized group characters and complex oriented cohomology theories

Let be the classifying space of a finite group . Given a multiplicative cohomology theory , the assignment

is a functor from groups to rings, endowed with induction (transfer) maps. In this paper we investigate these functors for complex oriented cohomology theories , using the theory of complex representations of finite groups as a model for what one would like to know.

An analogue of Artin's Theorem is proved for all complex oriented : the abelian subgroups of serve as a detecting family for , modulo torsion dividing the order of .

When is a complete local ring, with residue field of characteristic and associated formal group of height , we construct a character ring of class functions that computes . The domain of the characters is , the set of -tuples of elements in each of which has order a power of . A formula for induction is also found. The ideas we use are related to the Lubin-Tate theory of formal groups. The construction applies to many cohomology theories of current interest: completed versions of elliptic cohomology, -theory, etc.

The th Morava K-theory Euler characteristic for is computed to be the number of -orbits in . For various groups , including all symmetric groups, we prove that is concentrated in even degrees.

Our results about extend to theorems about , where is a finite -CW complex.

     

The size of the singular set in mean curvature flow of mean-convex sets

We prove that when a compact mean-convex subset of (or of an -dimensional riemannian manifold) moves by mean-curvature, the spacetime singular set has parabolic hausdorff dimension at most . Examples show that this is optimal. We also show that, as , the surface converges to a compact stable minimal hypersurface whose singular set has dimension at most . If , the convergence is everywhere smooth and hence after some time , the moving surface has no singularities

     

The essentially tame local Langlands correspondence, I

Let be a non-Archimedean local field (of characteristic or ) with finite residue field of characteristic . An irreducible smooth representation of the Weil group of is called essentially tame if its restriction to wild inertia is a sum of characters. The set of isomorphism classes of irreducible, essentially tame representations of dimension is denoted . The Langlands correspondence induces a bijection of with a certain set of irreducible supercuspidal representations of . We consider the set of isomorphism classes of certain pairs , called ``admissible', consisting of a tamely ramified field extension of degree and a quasicharacter of . There is an obvious bijection of with . Using the classification of supercuspidal representations and tame lifting, we construct directly a canonical bijection of with , generalizing and simplifying a construction of Howe (1977). Together, these maps give a canonical bijection of with . We show that one obtains the Langlands correspondence by composing the map with a permutation of of the form , where is a tamely ramified character of depending on . This answers a question of Moy (1986). We calculate the character in the case where is totally ramified of odd degree.

     

Semi-invariants of quivers and saturation for Littlewood-Richardson coefficients

Let be a quiver without oriented cycles. For a dimension vector let be the set of representations of with dimension vector . The group acts on . In this paper we show that the ring of semi-invariants is spanned by special semi-invariants associated to representations of . From this we show that the set of weights appearing in is saturated. In the case of triple flag quiver this reduces to the results of Knutson and Tao on the saturation of the set of triples of partitions for which the Littlewood-Richardson coefficient is nonzero.

     

Independence of of monodromy groups

Let be a smooth curve over a finite field of characteristic , let be a number field, and let be an -compatible system of lisse sheaves on the curve . For each place of not lying over , the -component of the system is a lisse -sheaf on , whose associated arithmetic monodromy group is an algebraic group over the local field . We use Serre's theory of Frobenius tori and Lafforgue's proof of Deligne's conjecture to show that when the -compatible system is semisimple and pure of some integer weight, the isomorphism type of the identity component of these monodromy groups is ``independent of '. More precisely, after replacing by a finite extension, there exists a connected split reductive algebraic group over the number field such that for every place of not lying over , the identity component of the arithmetic monodromy group of is isomorphic to the group with coefficients extended to the local field .

     

On a correspondence between cuspidal representations of

Let be an irreducible, automorphic, self-dual, cuspidal representation of , where is the adele ring of a number field . Assume that has a pole at and that . Given a nontrivial character of , we construct a nontrivial space of genuine and globally -generic cusp forms on -the metaplectic cover of . is invariant under right translations, and it contains all irreducible, automorphic, cuspidal (genuine) and -generic representations of , which lift (``functorially, with respect to ") to . We also present a local counterpart. Let be an irreducible, self-dual, supercuspidal representation of , where is a -adic field. Assume that has a pole at . Given a nontrivial character of , we construct an irreducible, supercuspidal (genuine) -generic representation of , such that has a pole at , and we prove that is the unique representation of satisfying these properties.

     

The enumerative geometry of surfaces and modular forms

Let be a surface, and let be a holomorphic curve in representing a primitive homology class. We count the number of curves of geometric genus with nodes passing through generic points in in the linear system for any and satisfying .

When , this coincides with the enumerative problem studied by Yau and Zaslow who obtained a conjectural generating function for the numbers. Recently, Göttsche has generalized their conjecture to arbitrary in terms of quasi-modular forms. We prove these formulas using Gromov-Witten invariants for families, a degeneration argument, and an obstruction bundle computation. Our methods also apply to blown up at 9 points where we show that the ordinary Gromov-Witten invariants of genus constrained to points are also given in terms of quasi-modular forms.     

Entire solutions of semilinear elliptic equations in and a conjecture of De Giorgi

In 1978 De Giorgi formulated the following conjecture. Let be a solution of in all of such that and 0$"> in . Is it true that all level sets of are hyperplanes, at least if ? Equivalently, does depend only on one variable? When , this conjecture was proved in 1997 by N. Ghoussoub and C. Gui. In the present paper we prove it for . The question, however, remains open for . The results for and 3 apply also to the equation for a large class of nonlinearities .

     

An uncountable family of nonorbit equivalent actions of

For each , we construct an uncountable family of free ergodic measure preserving actions of the free group on the standard probability space such that any two are nonorbit equivalent (in fact, not even stably orbit equivalent). These actions are all ``rigid' (in the sense of Popa), with the IIfactors mutually nonisomorphic (even nonstably isomorphic) and in the class

     

Multivariable cochain operations and little -cubes

In this paper we construct a small chain operad which acts naturally on the normalized cochains of a topological space. We also construct, for each , a suboperad which is quasi-isomorphic to the normalized singular chains of the little -cubes operad. The case leads to a substantial simplification of our earlier proof of Deligne's Hochschild cohomology conjecture.

     

On the size of -fold sum and product sets of integers

In this paper, we show that for all 1$"> there is a positive integer such that if is an arbitrary finite set of integers, 2$">, then either N^{b}$"> or N^{b}$">. Here (resp. ) denotes the -fold sum (resp. product) of . This fact is deduced from the following harmonic analysis result obtained in the paper. For all 2$"> and 0$">, there is a 0$"> such that if satisfies , then the -constant of (in the sense of W. Rudin) is at most .

     

Random polynomials with prescribed Newton polytope

The Newton polytope of a polynomial is well known to have a strong impact on its behavior. The Bernstein-Kouchnirenko Theorem asserts that even the number of simultaneous zeros in of a system of polynomials depends on their Newton polytopes. In this article, we show that Newton polytopes also have a strong impact on the distribution of zeros and pointwise norms of polynomials, the basic theme being that Newton polytopes determine allowed and forbidden regions in for these distributions.

Our results are statistical and asymptotic in the degree of the polynomials. We equip the space of polynomials of degree in complex variables with its usual SU-invariant Gaussian probability measure and then consider the conditional measure induced on the subspace of polynomials with fixed Newton polytope . We then determine the asymptotics of the conditional expectation of simultaneous zeros of polynomials with Newton polytope as . When , the unit simplex, it is clear that the expected zero distributions are uniform relative to the Fubini-Study form. For a convex polytope , we show that there is an allowed region on which is asymptotically uniform as the scaling factor . However, the zeros have an exotic distribution in the complementary forbidden region and when (the case of the Bernstein-Kouchnirenko Theorem), the expected percentage of simultaneous zeros in the forbidden region approaches 0 as .

     

Plurisubharmonic domination

For a large class of separable Banach spaces we prove the following. Given a pseudoconvex open and that is locally bounded above, there is a plurisubharmonic such that . We also discuss applications of this result.

     

On the number of zero-patterns of a sequence of polynomials

Let be a sequence of polynomials of degree in variables over a field . The zero-pattern of at is the set of those ( ) for which . Let denote the number of zero-patterns of as ranges over . We prove that for and

for . For , these bounds are optimal within a factor of . The bound () improves the bound proved by J. Heintz (1983) using the dimension theory of affine varieties. Over the field of real numbers, bounds stronger than Heintz's but slightly weaker than () follow from results of J. Milnor (1964), H.E.  Warren (1968), and others; their proofs use techniques from real algebraic geometry. In contrast, our half-page proof is a simple application of the elementary ``linear algebra bound'.

Heintz applied his bound to estimate the complexity of his quantifier elimination algorithm for algebraically closed fields. We give several additional applications. The first two establish the existence of certain combinatorial objects. Our first application, motivated by the ``branching program' model in the theory of computing, asserts that over any field , most graphs with vertices have projective dimension (the implied constant is absolute). This result was previously known over the reals (Pudlák-Rödl). The second application concerns a lower bound in the span program model for computing Boolean functions. The third application, motivated by a paper by N. Alon, gives nearly tight Ramsey bounds for matrices whose entries are defined by zero-patterns of a sequence of polynomials. We conclude the paper with a number of open problems.

     

On the image of the -adic Abel-Jacobi map for a variety over the algebraic closure of a finite field

Let be a smooth projective variety of dimension at most 4 defined over the algebraic closure of a finite field of characteristic . It is shown that the Tate conjecture implies the surjectivity of the -adic Abel-Jacobi map, , for all and almost all . For a special class of threefolds the surjectivity of is proved without assuming any conjectures.

     

Presentations of finite simple groups: A quantitative approach

There is a constant such that all nonabelian finite simple groups of rank over , with the possible exception of the Ree groups , have presentations with at most generators and relations and total length at most . As a corollary, we deduce a conjecture of Holt: there is a constant such that for every finite simple group , every prime and every irreducible -module .

     

The averaging lemma

Averaging lemmas deduce smoothness of velocity averages, such as

from properties of . A canonical example is that is in the Sobolev space whenever and are in . The present paper shows how techniques from Harmonic Analysis such as maximal functions, wavelet decompositions, and interpolation can be used to prove versions of the averaging lemma. For example, it is shown that implies that is in the Besov space , . Examples are constructed using wavelet decompositions to show that these averaging lemmas are sharp. A deeper analysis of the averaging lemma is made near the endpoint .

     

Integral motives and special values of zeta functions

For each field , we define a category of rationally decomposed mixed motives with -coefficients. When is finite, we show that the category is Tannakian, and we prove formulas relating the behaviour of zeta functions near integers to certain groups.

     

The homotopy theory of fusion systems

We define and characterize a class of -complete spaces which have many of the same properties as the -completions of classifying spaces of finite groups. For example, each such has a Sylow subgroup , maps for a -group are described via homomorphisms , and is isomorphic to a certain ring of ``stable elements' in . These spaces arise as the ``classifying spaces' of certain algebraic objects which we call ``-local finite groups'. Such an object consists of a system of fusion data in , as formalized by L. Puig, extended by some extra information carried in a category which allows rigidification of the fusion data.