Date of Degree
PhD (Doctor of Philosophy)
In the context of moment maps and diffeomorphisms of Kähler manifolds, Donaldson introduced a fully nonlinear Monge-Ampère type equation. Among the conjectures he made about this equation is that the existence of solutions is equivalent to a positivity condition on the initial data. Weinkove later affirmed Donaldson's conjecture using a gradient flow for the equation in the space of Kähler potentials of the initial data. The topic of this thesis is the case when the initial data is merely semipositive and the domain is a closed Kähler surface. Regularity techniques for degenerate Monge-Ampère equations, specifically those coming from pluripotential theory, are used to prove the existence of a bounded, unique, weak solution. With the aid of a Nakai criterion, due to Lamari and Buchdahl, it is shown that this solution is smooth away from some curves of negative self-intersection.
1, iii, 74
Copyright 2010 Arvind Satya Rao