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The first goal of this paper is to construct examples of higher dimensional contact manifolds with specific properties. Our main results in this direction are the existence of tight virtually overtwisted closed contact manifolds in all…

We show that every smooth closed oriented four-manifold admits a decomposition into two co- dimension zero submanifolds with common boundary. Each of these submanifolds carries a structure of a symplectic manifold with pseudo-convex…

We prove that a closed 4-manifold has shadow-complexity zero if and only if it is a kind of 4-dimensional graph manifold, which decomposes into some particular blocks along embedded copies of S^2 x S^1, plus some complex projective spaces.…

Just as knots and links can be algebraically described as certain morphisms in the category of tangles in 3 dimensions, compact surfaces smoothly embedded in R^4 can be described as certain 2-morphisms in the 2-category of `2-tangles in 4…

We show that any closed manifold with a metric of nonpositive curvature that admits either a single point rank condition or a single point curvature condition has positive simplicial volume. We use this to provide a differential geometric…

We show that a finite type duality group of dimension $d>2$ is the fundamental group of a $(d+3)$-manifold with rationally acyclic universal cover. We use this to find closed manifolds with rationally acyclic universal cover and some…

We prove that if a closed manifold $B$ is a connected component of the binding of an open book decomposition of a manifold $M$, then every open book decomposition of $B$ spun embeds in $M$. As an application, we prove that every open book…

We describe topological gauge theories for which duality properties are encoded by construction. We study them for compact manifolds of dimensions four, eight and two. The fields and their duals are treated symmetrically, within the context…

We show that, in dimension at least $4$, the set of locally finite simplicial volumes of oriented connected open manifolds is $[0, \infty]$. Moreover, we consider the case of tame open manifolds and some low-dimensional examples.

For each nonnegative integer we find an open (4m+9)-dimensional simply-connected manifold admitting complete nonnegatively curved metrics whose souls are non-diffeomorphic, homeomorphic, and have codimension 2. We give a diffeomorphism…

We show that there exist closed manifolds with arbitrarily small transcendental simplicial volumes. Moreover, we exhibit an explicit uncountable family of (transcendental) real numbers that are not realised as the simplicial volume of a…

We study the question when a manifold that fibers over a sphere can be rationally essential, or even have positive simplicial volume. More concretely, we show that mapping tori of manifolds (whose fundamental groups can be quite arbitrary)…

We classify closed, simply connected $n$-manifolds of non-negative sectional curvature admitting an isometric torus action of maximal symmetry rank in dimensions $2\leq n\leq 6$. In dimensions $3k$, $k=1,2$ there is only one such manifold…

We prove that for any closed, connected, oriented 3-manifold M, there exists an infinite family of 2-fold branched covers of M that are hyperbolic 3-manifolds and surface bundles over the circle with arbitrarily large volume.

Let X be a closed manifold of dimension 2m >= 6 with torsion-free middle-dimensional homology. We construct metrics on X of arbitrarily small volume, such that every middle-dimensional submanifold of less than unit volume necessarily…

We give a direct proof of a cancellation formula raised in [7] on the level of differential forms. We also obtain more cancellation formulas for even dimensional Riemannian manifolds with a complex line bundle involved. Relations among…

In all dimensions $n \ge 4$ not of the form $4m+3$, we show that there exists a closed hyperbolic $n$-manifold which is not the boundary of a compact $(n+1)$-manifold. The proof relies on the relationship between the cobordism class and the…

In any dimension at least five we construct examples of closed smooth manifolds with the following properties: 1) they have neither real projective nor flat conformal structures; 2) their fundamental group is a non-elementary Gromov…

We consider singular foliations of codimension one on 3-manifolds, in the sense defined by A. Haefliger as being Gamma_1-structures. We prove that under the obvious linear embedding condition, they are Gamma_1-homotopic to a regular…

Free Maxwell theory on general four-manifolds may, under certain conditions on the background geometry, exhibit holomorphic factorization in its partition function. We show that when this occurs, new discrete symmetries emerge at orbifold…