Necessary and sufficient conditions are given (in terms of monodromy) for extending a family of smooth curves over an open subset U ⊂ S to a family of stable curves over S. More precisely, we introduce the abelian monodromy extension (AME) property and show that the standard Deligne-Mumford compactification is the unique, maximal AME compactification of the moduli space of curves. We also show ...

We review recent work in which compactifications of string and M theory are constructed in which all scalar fields (moduli) are massive, and supersymmetry is broken with a small positive cosmological constant, features needed to reproduce real world physics. We explain how this work implies that there is a “landscape” of string/M theory vacua, perhaps containing many candidates for describing r...

In this paper we establish a characterization of abelian compact Hausdorff semigroups with unique idempotent and ideal retraction property. We also introduce a function algebra on a semitopological semigroup whose associated semigroup compactification is universal withrespect to these properties.

In this paper, the concept of soft ultrafilters is introduced and some of the related structures such as soft Stone-Cech compactification, principal soft ultrafilters and basis for its topology are studied.

1. I n t r o d u c t i o n . In [4], De Groot and Aarts constructed Hausdorff compactifications of topological spaces to obtain a new intrinsic characterization of complete regularity. These compactifications were called GA compactifications in [5] and [7]. A characterization of complete regularity was earlier given by Fr ink [3], by means of Wallman compactifications, a method which led to the...