Recurrence of cocycles and stationary random walks

We survey distributional properties of $\mathbb{R}^d$-valued cocycles of finite measure preserving ergodic transformations (or, equivalently, of stationary random walks in $\mathbb{R}^d$) which determine recurrence or transience.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/074921706000000112 in the IMS Lecture Notes--Monograph Series (http://www.imstat.org/publications/lecnotes.htm) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Basic zeta functions and some applications in physics

It is the aim of these lectures to introduce some basic zeta functions and their uses in the areas of the Casimir effect and Bose-Einstein condensation. A brief introduction into these areas is given in the respective sections. We will consider exclusively spectral zeta functions, that is zeta functions arising from the eigenvalue spectrum of suitable differential operators. There is a set of technical tools that are at the very heart of understanding analytical properties of essentially every spectral zeta function. Those tools are introduced using the well-studied examples of the Hurwitz, Epstein and Barnes zeta function. It is explained how these different examples of zeta functions can all be thought of as being generated by the same mechanism, namely they all result from eigenvalues of suitable (partial) differential operators. It is this relation with partial differential operators that provides the motivation for analyzing the zeta functions considered in these lectures. Motivations come for example from the questions "Can one hear the shape of a drum?" and "What does the Casimir effect know about a boundary?". Finally "What does a Bose gas know about its container?"Comment: To appear in "A Window into Zeta and Modular Physics", Mathematical Sciences Research Institute Publications, Vol. 57, 2010, Cambridge University Pres

Stability and instability of Ricci solitons

We consider the volume-normalized Ricci flow close to compact shrinking Ricci solitons. We show that if a compact Ricci soliton $(M,g)$ is a local maximum of Perelman's shrinker entropy, any normalized Ricci flow starting close to it exists for all time and converges towards a Ricci soliton. If $g$ is not a local maximum of the shrinker entropy, we show that there exists a nontrivial normalized Ricci flow emerging from it. These theorems are analogues of results in the Ricci-flat and in the Einstein case.Comment: 23 pages, published versio