Contact Hypersurfaces in Uniruled Symplectic Manifolds Always Separate

We observe that nonzero Gromov-Witten invariants with marked point constraints in a closed symplectic manifold imply restrictions on the homology classes that can be represented by contact hypersurfaces. As a special case, contact hypersurfaces must always separate if the symplectic manifold is uniruled. This removes a superfluous assumption in a result of G. Lu, thus implying that all contact manifolds that embed as contact type hypersurfaces into uniruled symplectic manifolds satisfy the Weinstein conjecture. We prove the main result using the Cieliebak-Mohnke approach to defining Gromov-Witten invariants via Donaldson hypersurfaces, thus no semipositivity or virtual moduli cycles are required.Comment: 24 pages, 1 figure; v.3 is a substantial expansion in which the semipositivity condition has been removed by implementing Cieliebak-Mohnke transversality; it also includes a new appendix to explain why the forgetful map in the Cieliebak-Mohnke context is a pseudocycle; v.4 has one short remark added; to appear in J. London Math. So

Locally holomorphic maps yield symplectic structures

For a smooth map $f:X^4\to\Sigma^2$ that is locally modeled by holomorphic maps, the domain is shown to admit a symplectic structure that is symplectic on some regular fiber, if and only if $f^*[\Sigma]\ne0$. If so, the space of symplectic forms on $X$ that are symplectic on all fibers is nonempty and contractible. The cohomology classes of these forms vary with the maximum possible freedom on the reducible fibers, subject to the obvious constraints. The above results are derived via an analogous theorem for locally holomorphic maps $f:X^{2n}\to Y^{2n-2}$ with $Y$ symplectic.Comment: 10 pages, no figure

Topological Ghosts: the Teeming of the Shrews

We consider dynamics of spacetime volume-filling form fields with "wrong sign" kinetic terms, such as in so-called Type-II$^*$ string theories. Locally, these form fields are just additive renormalizations of the cosmological constant. They have no fluctuating degrees of freedom. However, once the fields are coupled to membranes charged under them, their configurations are unstable: by a process analogous to Schwinger pair production the field space-filling flux increases. This reduces the cosmological constant, and preserves the null energy condition, since the processes that can violate it by reducing the form flux are very suppressed. The increase of the form flux implies that as time goes on the probability for further membrane nucleation {\it increases}, in contrast to the usual case where the field approaches its vacuum value and ceases to induce further transitions. Thus, in such models spaces with tiny positive vacuum energy are ultimately unstable, but the instability may be slow and localized. In a cosmological setting, this instability can enhance black hole rate formation, by locally making the vacuum energy negative at late times, which constrains the scales controlling membrane dynamics, and may even collapse a large region of the visible universe.Comment: 1+13 pages, 2 figure

Total Curvature of Graphs after Milnor and Euler

We define a new notion of total curvature, called net total curvature, for finite graphs embedded in Rn, and investigate its properties. Two guiding principles are given by Milnor's way of measuring the local crookedness of a Jordan curve via a Crofton-type formula, and by considering the double cover of a given graph as an Eulerian circuit. The strength of combining these ideas in defining the curvature functional is (1) it allows us to interpret the singular/non-eulidean behavior at the vertices of the graph as a superposition of vertices of a 1-dimensional manifold, and thus (2) one can compute the total curvature for a wide range of graphs by contrasting local and global properties of the graph utilizing the integral geometric representation of the curvature. A collection of results on upper/lower bounds of the total curvature on isotopy/homeomorphism classes of embeddings is presented, which in turn demonstrates the effectiveness of net total curvature as a new functional measuring complexity of spatial graphs in differential-geometric terms.Comment: Most of the results contained in "Total curvature and isotopy of graphs in $R^3$."(arXiv:0806.0406) have been incorporated into the current articl