Wrinkled fibrations on near-symplectic manifolds

Motivated by the programmes initiated by Taubes and Perutz, we study the geometry of near-symplectic 4-manifolds, i.e., manifolds equipped with a closed 2-form which is symplectic outside a union of embedded 1-dimensional submanifolds, and broken Lefschetz fibrations on them. We present a set of four moves which allow us to pass from any given fibration to any other broken fibration which is deformation equivalent to it. Moreover, we study the change of the near-symplectic geometry under each of these moves. The arguments rely on the introduction of a more general class of maps, which we call wrinkled fibrations and which allow us to rely on classical singularity theory.Finally, we illustrate these constructions by showing how one can merge components of the zero-set of the near-symplectic form. We also disprove a conjecture of Gay and Kirby by showing that any achiral broken Lefschetz fibration can be turned into a broken Lefschetz fibration by applying a sequence of our moves.Comment: 35 pages, 12 figures. Final version. Minor corrections and clarification

Hyperbolic Unfoldings of Minimal Hypersurfaces

We study the intrinsic geometry of area minimizing (and also of almost minimizing) hypersurfaces from a new point of view by relating this subject to quasiconformal geometry. For any such hypersurface we define and construct a so-called S-structure which reveals some unexpected geometric and analytic properties of the hypersurface and its singularity set. In this paper, this is used to prove the existence of hyperbolic unfoldings: canonical conformal deformations of the regular part of these hypersurfaces into complete Gromov hyperbolic spaces of bounded geometry with Gromov boundary homeomorphic to the singular set

Versal unfoldings for linear retarded functional differential equations

We consider parametrized families of linear retarded functional differential equations (RFDEs) projected onto finite-dimensional invariant manifolds, and address the question of versality of the resulting parametrized family of linear ordinary differential equations. A sufficient criterion for versality is given in terms of readily computable quantities. In the case where the unfolding is not versal, we show how to construct a perturbation of the original linear RFDE (in terms of delay differential operators) whose finite-dimensional projection generates a versal unfolding. We illustrate the theory with several examples, and comment on the applicability of these results to bifurcation analyses of nonlinear RFDEs