Given a general polarized $K3$ surface $S\subset \mathbb P^g$ of genus $g\le 14$, we study projections of minimal degree and their variational structure. In particular, we prove that the degree of irrationality of all such surfaces is at most $4$, and that for $g=7,8,9,11$ there are no rational maps of degree $3$ induced by the primitive linear system. Our methods combine vector bundle techniques à la Lazarsfeld with derived category tools and also make use of the rich theory of singular curves on $K3$ surfaces.

We study the behaviour of Kauffman bracket skein modules of 3-manifolds under gluing along surfaces. For this we extend this notion to $3$-manifolds with marking consisting of open intervals and circles in the boundary. The new module is called the stated skein module.

The first results concern non-injectivity of certain natural maps defined when forming connected sums along spheres or disks. These maps are injective for surfaces or for generic quantum parameter, but we show that in general they are not when the quantum parameter is a root of 1. We show that when the quantum parameter is a root of 1, the empty skein is zero in a connected sum where each constituent manifold has non-empty marking. We also prove various non-injectivity results for the Chebyshev-Frobenius map and the map induced by deleting marked balls.

We then interpret stated skein modules as a monoidal symmetric functor from a category of “decorated cobordisms” to a category of algebras and their bimodules. We apply this to deduce properties of stated skein modules as a Van-Kampen like theorem, a computation through Heegaard decompositions and a relation to Hochshild homology for trivial circle bundles over surfaces.

Given a polarised abelian variety over a number field, we provide totally explicit upper bounds for the cardinality of the rational points whose Néron-Tate height is less than a small threshold. These imply new estimates for the number of torsion points as well as the minimal height of a non-torsion point. Our bounds involve the Faltings height and dimension of the abelian variety together with the degrees of the polarisation and the number field but we also get a stronger statement where we use certain successive minima associated to the period lattice at a fixed archimedean place, in the spirit of a result of David for elliptic curves.

We describe the structure of regular codimension $1$ foliations with numerically projectively flat tangent bundle on complex projective manifolds of dimension at least $4$. Along the way, we prove that either the normal bundle of a regular codimension $1$ foliation is pseudo-effective, or its conormal bundle is nef.

In this paper, we study the twisted Ruelle zeta function associated with the geodesic flow of a compact, hyperbolic, odd-dimensional manifold X. The twisted Ruelle zeta function is associated with an acyclic representation $\chi \colon \pi _{1}(X) \rightarrow \operatorname {\mathrm {GL}}_{n}(\mathbb {C})$, which is close enough to an acyclic, unitary representation. In this case, the twisted Ruelle zeta function is regular at zero and equals the square of the refined analytic torsion, as it is introduced by Braverman and Kappeler in [6], multiplied by an exponential, which involves the eta invariant of the even part of the odd-signature operator, associated with $\chi $.

What proportion of integers $n \leq N$ may be expressed as $x^2 + dy^2$ for some $d \leq \Delta $, with $x,y$ integers? Writing $\Delta = (\log N)^{\log 2} 2^{\alpha \sqrt {\log \log N}}$ for some $\alpha \in (-\infty , \infty )$, we show that the answer is $\Phi (\alpha ) + o(1)$, where $\Phi $ is the Gaussian distribution function $\Phi (\alpha ) = \frac {1}{\sqrt {2\pi }} \int ^{\alpha }_{-\infty } e^{-x^2/2} dx$.

A consequence of this is a phase transition: Almost none of the integers $n \leq N$ can be represented by $x^2 + dy^2$ with $d \leq (\log N)^{\log 2 - \varepsilon }$, but almost all of them can be represented by $x^2 + dy^2$ with $d \leq (\log N)^{\log 2 + \varepsilon}\kern-1.5pt$.

Let X be a smooth, projective and geometrically connected curve defined over a finite field ${\mathbb {F}}_q$ of characteristic p different from $2$ and $S\subseteq X$ a subset of closed points. Let $\overline {X}$ and $\overline {S}$ be their base changes to an algebraic closure of ${\mathbb {F}}_q$. We study the number of $\ell $-adic local systems $(\ell \neq p)$ in rank $2$ over $\overline {X}-\overline {S}$ with all possible prescribed tame local monodromies fixed by k-fold iterated action of Frobenius endomorphism for every $k\geq 1$. In all cases, we confirm conjectures of Deligne predicting that these numbers behave as if they were obtained from a Lefschetz fixed point formula. In fact, our counting results are expressed in terms of the numbers of some Higgs bundles.

We show that Calabi–Yau fibrations over curves are uniformly K-stable in an adiabatic sense if and only if the base curves are K-stable in the log-twisted sense. Moreover, we prove that there are cscK metrics for such fibrations when the total spaces are smooth.

A famous theorem of Shokurov states that a general anticanonical divisor of a smooth Fano threefold is a smooth K3 surface. This is quite surprising since there are several examples where the base locus of the anticanonical system has codimension two. In this paper, we show that for four-dimensional Fano manifolds the behaviour is completely opposite: if the base locus is a normal surface, and hence has codimension two, all the anticanonical divisors are singular.

Mukai’s program in [16] seeks to recover a K3 surface X from any curve C on it by exhibiting it as a Fourier–Mukai partner to a Brill–Noether locus of vector bundles on the curve. In the case X has Picard number one and the curve $C\in |H|$ is primitive, this was confirmed by Feyzbakhsh in [11, 13] for $g\geq 11$ and $g\neq 12$. More recently, Feyzbakhsh has shown in [12] that certain moduli spaces of stable bundles on X are isomorphic to the Brill–Noether locus of curves in $|H|$ if g is sufficiently large. In this paper, we work with irreducible curves in a nonprimitive ample linear system $|mH|$ and prove that Mukai’s program is valid for any irreducible curve when $g\neq 2$, $mg\geq 11$ and $mg\neq 12$. Furthermore, we introduce the destabilising regions to improve Feyzbakhsh’s analysis in [12]. We show that there are hyper-Kähler varieties as Brill–Noether loci of curves in every dimension.