Lipschitz Domains,Domains with Corners,and the Hodge Laplacian

ABSTRACT

We define self-adjoint extensions of the Hodge Laplacian on Lipschitz domains in Riemannian manifolds, corresponding to either the absolute or the relative boundary condition, and examine regularity properties of these operators' domains and form domains. We obtain results valid for general Lipschitz domains, and stronger results for a special class of “almost convex” domains, which apply to domains with corners.     

Cobordism,Relative Indices and Stein Fillings

In this article we build on the framework developed in Ann. Math. 166, 183–214 ([2007]), 166, 723–777 ([2007]), 167, 1–67 ([2008]) to obtain a more complete understanding of the gluing properties for indices of boundary value problems for the Spin _ℂ-Dirac operator with sub-elliptic boundary conditions. We extend our analytic results for sub-elliptic boundary value problems for the Spin _ℂ-Dirac operator, and gluing results for the indices of these boundary problems to Spin _ℂ-manifolds with several pseudoconvex (pseudoconcave) boundary components. These results are applied to study Stein fillability for compact, 3-dimensional, contact manifolds. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0603973, and the Francis J. Carey term chair. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.     

Instanton Floer homology and contact structures

We define an invariant of contact 3-manifolds with convex boundary using Kronheimer and Mrowka’s sutured instanton Floer homology theory. This is the first invariant of contact manifolds—with or without boundary—defined in the instanton Floer setting. We prove that our invariant vanishes for overtwisted contact structures and is nonzero for contact manifolds with boundary which embed into Stein fillable contact manifolds. Moreover, we propose a strategy by which our contact invariant might be used to relate the fundamental group of a closed contact 3-manifold to properties of its Stein fillings. Our construction is inspired by a reformulation of a similar invariant in the monopole Floer setting defined by Baldwin and Sivek (arXiv:1403.1930, 2014).     

Two-weight estimates for singular and strongly singular integral operators

We give a Pontryagin-Thom type construction for Stein factorizations of fold maps of 3-manifolds into the plane. As an application, we compute the cobordism group of Stein factorizations of fold maps of oriented 3-manifolds into the plane and the oriented cobordism group of fold maps of 3-manifolds into the plane. It turns out that these two groups are isomorphic to Z ₂ ⊕ Z ₂. We have the analogous results about bordism groups as well.      

Functors and Computations in Floer Homology with Applications, I

This paper is concerned with Floer cohomology of manifolds with contact type boundary. In this case, there is no conjecture on this ring, as opposed to the compact case, where it is isomorphic to the usual cohomology (with the quantum product). We construct two mappings in Floer cohomology and prove some functorial properties of these two mappings. The first one is a map from the Floer cohomology of M to the relative cohomology of M modulo its boundary. The other is associated to a codimension zero embedding, and may be considered as a cohomological transfer. These maps are used to define some properties of symplectic manifolds with contact type boundary. These are algebraic versions of the Weinstein conjecture, asserting existence of closed characteristics on . This is proved for many cases, Euclidean space and subcritical Stein manifolds, vector bundles, products, cotangent bundles. It is also proved that the above property implies some restrictions on Lagrangian embeddings, and also yields in certain cases, existence results for holomorphic curves bounded by the Lagrange submanifold. The last section is devoted to applications of this existence result, to real forms of Stein manifolds and obstructions to polynomial convexity in Stein manifolds. Many of our applications rely on the computation of the Floer cohomology of a cotangent bundle, that is the subject of Part II. Submitted: December 1997, revised version: February 1999.     

Compact Stein surfaces with boundary as branched covers of B4

We prove that Stein surfaces with boundary coincide up to orientation preserving diffeomorphisms with simple branched coverings of B ⁴ whose branch set is a positive braided surface. As a consequence, we have that a smooth oriented 3-manifold is Stein fillable iff it has a positive open-book decomposition. Oblatum 24-II-2000 & 30-V-2000?Published online: 16 August 2000     

The Chern-Connes character for the Dirac operator on manifolds with boundary

A cyclic cocycle is constructed for the Dirac operator on a compact spin manifold with boundary with the -invariant cochain introduced as the boundary correction term. This cocycle is seen to satisfy certain growth condition weaker than being entire and its pairing with the Chern characters of idempotents as well as the relevant index formulae are studied. The -cochain is a generalization of the Atiyah-Patodi-Singer -invariant and it carries information on the APS -invariants for Dirac operators twisted by bundles. It is also shown that one obtains the transgressed Chern character, defined by Connes and Moscovici, by applying the boundary operatorB in the cyclic bicomplex to the higher components of the -cochain.     

Spectrum of the Kerzman–Stein operator for a family of smooth regions in the plane

The Kerzman–Stein operator is the skew-hermitian part of the Cauchy operator defined with respect to an unweighted hermitian inner product on the boundary. For bounded regions with smooth boundary, the Kerzman–Stein operator is compact on the Hilbert space of square integrable functions. Here we give an explicit computation of its Hilbert–Schmidt norm for a family of simply connected regions. We also give an explicit computation of the Cauchy operator acting on an orthonormal basis, and we give estimates for the norms of the Kerzman–Stein and Cauchy operators on these regions. The regions are the first regions that display no apparent Möbius symmetry for which there now is explicit spectral information.     

Some results on quadratic hedging with insider trading

We consider the hedging problem in an arbitrage-free incomplete financial market, where there are two kinds of investors with different levels of information about the future price evolution, described by two filtrations F and G=F∨σ(G) where G is a given r.v. representing the additional information. We focus on two types of quadratic approaches to hedge a given square-integrable contingent claim: local risk minimization (LRM) and mean-variance hedging (MVH). By using initial enlargement of filtrations techniques, we solve the hedging problem for both investors and compare their optimal strategies under both approaches.

In particular, for LRM, we show that for a large class of additional non trivial r.v.s G both investors will pursue the same locally risk minimizing portfolio strategy and the cost process of the ordinary agent is just the projection on F of that of the insider. For the MVH approach, we study also some general stochastic volatility model, including Hull and White, Heston and Stein and Stein models. In this more specific setting and for r.v.s G which are measurable with respect to the filtration generated by the volatility process, we obtain an expression for the insider optimal strategy in terms of the ordinary agent optimal strategy plus a process admitting a simple feedback-type representation.     

Fortsetzung Ganzzahliger Cozyklen von Kompakten Teilen

Let Y be a topological space and X a subspace of Y. We assume that X is the union of an increasing sequence of subspaces K_S such that every quasi-compact subset of X is contained in some K_S and the singular homology groups of all K_S are finitely generated. The object of this paper is to give a purely algebraic characterisation of the following subgroup of H^q (X,Z): it consists of all those elements in H^q (X,Z) whose image in each of the H^q (K_S,Z) lies in the image of the induced homomorphism H^q (Y,Z)H^q (K_S,Z), These subgroups are encountered in Runge approximation theory. Partial results were obtained in an earlier common paper with K. Stein, [1].

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Meinem verehrten Lehrer Karl Stein zum 60. Geburtstag gewidmet     

Remarks on weakly pseudoconvex boundaries

In this paper, we consider the boundary M of a weakly pseudoconvex domain in a Stein manifold. We point out a striking difference between the local cohomology and the global cohomology of M, and illustrate this with an example. We also discuss the first and second Cousin problems, and the strong Poincaré problem for CR meromorphic functions on the weakly pseudoconvex boundary M.     

Envelopes of holomorphy and holomorphic discs

The envelope of holomorphy of an arbitrary domain in a two-dimensional Stein manifold is identified with a connected component of the set of equivalence classes of analytic discs immersed into the Stein manifold with boundary in the domain. This implies, in particular, that for each of its points the envelope of holomorphy contains an embedded (non-singular) Riemann surface (and also an immersed analytic disc) passing through this point with boundary contained in the natural embedding of the original domain into its envelope of holomorphy. Moreover, it says, that analytic continuation to a neighbourhood of an arbitrary point of the envelope of holomorphy can be performed by applying the Continuity Principle once. Another corollary concerns representation of certain elements of the fundamental group of the domain by boundaries of analytic discs. A particular case is the following. Given a contact three-manifold with Stein filling, any element of the fundamental group of the contact manifold whose representatives are contractible in the filling can be represented by the boundary of an immersed analytic disc.     

The Boundary Regularity of a Weak Solution of the Navier-Stokes Equation and its Connection to the Interior Regularity of Pressure

We assume that v is a weak solution to the non-steady Navier-Stokes initial-boundary value problem that satisfies the strong energy inequality in its domain and the Prodi-Serrin integrability condition in the neighborhood of the boundary. We show the consequences for the regularity of v near the boundary and the connection with the interior regularity of an associated pressure and the time derivative of v.     

Relative symplectic caps, 4-genus and fibered knots

We prove relative versions of the symplectic capping theorem and sufficiency of Giroux’s criterion for Stein fillability and use these to study the 4-genus of knots. More precisely, suppose we have a symplectic 4-manifold X with convex boundary and a symplectic surface Σ in X such that ?Σ is a transverse knot in ?X. In this paper, we prove that there is a closed symplectic 4-manifold Y with a closed symplectic surface S such that (X,Σ) embeds into (Y,S) symplectically. As a consequence we obtain a relative version of the symplectic Thom conjecture. We also prove a relative version of the sufficiency part of Giroux’s criterion for Stein fillability, namely, we show that a fibered knot whose mondoromy is a product of positive Dehn twists bounds a symplectic surface in a Stein filling. We use this to study 4-genus of fibered knots in \(\mathbb {S}^{3} \). Further, we give a criterion for quasipositive fibered knots to be strongly quasipositive.     

Cobordism of disk knots

We study cobordisms and cobordisms rel boundary of PL locally-flat disk knots D ⁿ⁻² ↪ D ⁿ . Any two disk knots are cobordant if the cobordisms are not required to fix the boundary sphere knots, and any two even-dimensional disk knots with isotopic boundary knots are cobordant rel boundary. However, the cobordism rel boundary theory of odd-dimensional disk knots is more subtle. Generalizing results of J. Levine on the cobordism of sphere knots, we define disk knot Seifert matrices and show that two higher-dimensional disk knots with isotopic boundaries are cobordant rel boundary if and only if their disk knot Seifert matrices are algebraically cobordant. We also ask which algebraic cobordism classes can be realized given a fixed boundary knot and provide a complete classification when the boundary knot has no 2-torsion in its middle-dimensional Alexander module. In the course of this classification, we establish a close connection between the Blanchfield pairing of a disk knot and the Farber-Levine torsion pairing of its boundary knot (in fact, for disk knots satisfying certain connectivity assumptions, the disk knot Blanchfield pairing will determine the boundary Farber-Levine pairing). In addition, we study the dependence of disk knot Seifert matrices on choices of Seifert surface, demonstrating that all such Seifert matrices are rationally S-equivalent, but not necessarily integrally S-equivalent.     

Stein extensions of real symmetric spaces and the geometry of the flag manifold

 Let G be a connected semisimple Lie group contained in its simply connected complexification G _C . Let KG∩K _C be a maximal compact subgroup of G. Denote by X _o the unique closed G-orbit in the full flag manifold ℱ and by 𝒪 the unique open K _C -orbit in ℱ. The set consisting of the elements gK _C so that gX _o ⊂𝒪 is an Stein extension of G/K⊂G _C /K _C . There is a universal domain , natural form the point of view of group actions which has been conjectured to be Stein. The main result of this paper is the inclusion . In the second part of the paper I show, under some dominance condition in the parameter, that representations in Dolbeault cohomology can be realized as holomorphic sections of vector bundles over . Received: 9 September 2002 / Revised version: 12 July 2002 / Published online: 8 April 2003 Mathematics Subject Classification (2002): 22E30 Research partially supported by NSF grant DMS-9801605 and DMS 0074991.     

Maximum principles and symmetry results for a class of fully nonlinear elliptic PDEs

This paper is concerned with a class of boundary value problems for fully nonlinear elliptic PDEs involving the p-Hessian operator. We first derive a maximum principle for a suitable function involving the solution u(x) and its gradient. This maximum principle is then applied to obtain some sharp estimates for the solution and the magnitude of its gradient. We also investigate some symmetry properties of Ω or u(x) under specific boundary condition or geometry of Ω.     

The Kernel Bundle of a Holomorphic Fredholm Family

Let 𝒴 be a smooth connected manifold, Σ ? ? an open set and (σ, y) → 𝒫 _y (σ) a family of unbounded Fredholm operators D ? H ₁ → H ₂ of index 0 depending smoothly on (y, σ) ∈ 𝒴 × Σ and holomorphically on σ. We show how to associate to 𝒫, under mild hypotheses, a smooth vector bundle 𝒦 → 𝒴 whose fiber over a given y ∈ 𝒴 consists of classes, modulo holomorphic elements, of meromorphic elements φ with 𝒫 _y φ holomorphic. As applications we give two examples relevant in the general theory of boundary value problems for elliptic wedge operators.