WITTEN DEFORMATION FOR NONCOMPACT MANIFOLDS WITH BOUNDED GEOMETRY

Motivated by the Landau–Ginzburg model, we study the Witten deformation on a noncompact manifold with bounded geometry, together with some tameness condition on the growth of the Morse function f near infinity. We prove that the cohomology of the Witten deformation $d_{Tf}$ acting on the complex of smooth $L^2$ forms is isomorphic to the cohomology of the Thom–Smale complex of f as well as the relative cohomology of a certain pair $(M, U)$ for sufficiently large T. We establish an Agmon estimate for eigenforms of the Witten Laplacian which plays an essential role in identifying these cohomologies via Witten’s instanton complex, defined in terms of eigenspaces of the Witten Laplacian for small eigenvalues. As an application, we obtain the strong Morse inequalities in this setting.

Orbifold hyperbolicity

We define and study jet bundles in the geometric orbifold category. We show that the usual arguments from the compact and the logarithmic settings do not all extend to this more general framework. This is illustrated by simple examples of orbifold pairs of general type that do not admit any global jet differential, even if some of these examples satisfy the Green–Griffiths–Lang conjecture. This contrasts with an important result of Demailly (Holomorphic Morse inequalities and the Green-Griffiths-Lang conjecture, Pure Appl. Math. Q. 7 (2011), 1165–1207) proving that compact varieties of general type always admit jet differentials. We illustrate the usefulness of the study of orbifold jets by establishing the hyperbolicity of some orbifold surfaces, that cannot be derived from the current techniques in Nevanlinna theory. We also conjecture that Demailly's theorem should hold for orbifold pairs with smooth boundary divisors under a certain natural multiplicity condition, and provide some evidence towards it.