An Introduction to Harmonic Manifolds and the Lichnerowicz Conjecture

The title is self-explanatory. We aim to give an easy to read and self-contained introduction to the field of harmonic manifolds. Only basic knowledge of Riemannian geometry is required. After we gave the definition of harmonicity and derived some properties, we concentrate on Z. I. Szab\'o's proof of Lichnerowicz's conjecture in the class of compact simply connected manifolds

Bordered Floer homology and the spectral sequence of a branched double cover I

Given a link in the three-sphere, Z. Szab\'o and the second author constructed a spectral sequence starting at the Khovanov homology of the link and converging to the Heegaard Floer homology of its branched double-cover. The aim of this paper and its sequel is to explicitly calculate this spectral sequence, using bordered Floer homology. There are two primary ingredients in this computation: an explicit calculation of filtered bimodules associated to Dehn twists and a pairing theorem for polygons. In this paper we give the first ingredient, and so obtain a combinatorial spectral sequence from Khovanov homology to Heegaard Floer homology; in the sequel we show that this spectral sequence agrees with the previously known one.Comment: 45 pages, 16 figures. v2: Published versio

q−q-Wiener (α,q)−\alpha,q)- Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes. A generalization of known processes

We collect, scattered through literature, as well as we prove some new properties of two Markov processes that in many ways resemble Wiener and Ornstein--Uhlenbeck processes. Although processes considered in this paper were defined either in non-commutative probability context or through quadratic harnesses we define them once more as so to say 'continuous time ' generalization of a simple, symmetric, discrete time process satisfying simple conditions imposed on the form of its first two conditional moments. The finite dimensional distributions of the first one (say X=(X_{t})_{t\geq0} called q-Wiener) depends on one parameter q\in(-1,1] and of the second one (say Y=(Y_{t})_{t\inR} called ({\alpha},q)- Ornstein--Uhlenbeck) on two parameters ({\alpha},q)\in(0,\infty)\times(-1,1]. The first one resembles Wiener process in the sense that for q=1 it is Wiener process but also that for |q|<1 and \foralln\geq1: t^{n/2}H_{n}(X_{t}/\surdt|q), where (H_{n})_{n\geq0} are the so called q-Hermite polynomials, are martingales. It does not have however neither independent increments not allows continuous sample path modification. The second one resembles Ornstein--Uhlenbeck process. For q=1 it is a classical OU process. For |q|<1 it is also stationary with correlation function equal to exp(-{\alpha}|t-s|) and has many properties resembling those of its classical version. We think that these process are fascinating objects to study posing many interesting, open questions.Comment: 25 page