Hardy’s uncertainty principle for the Gabor transform is proved for locally compact abelian groups having noncompact identity component and groups of the form $\mathbb{R}^{n}\times K$, where $K$ is a compact group having irreducible representations of bounded dimension. We also show that Hardy’s theorem fails for a connected nilpotent Lie group $G$ which admits a square integrable irreducible representation. Further, a similar conclusion is made for groups of the form $G\times D$, where $D$ is a discrete group.

The Kodaira–Thurston manifold is a quotient of a nilpotent Lie group by a cocompact lattice. We compute the family Gromov–Witten invariants which count pseudoholomorphic tori in the Kodaira–Thurston manifold. For a fixed symplectic form the Gromov–Witten invariant is trivial so we consider the twistor family of left-invariant symplectic forms which are orthogonal for some fixed metric on the Lie algebra. This family defines a loop in the space of symplectic forms. This is the first example of a genus one family Gromov–Witten computation for a non-Kähler manifold.

We formulate and prove two versions of Miyachi’s theorem for connected, simply connected nilpotent Lie groups. This allows us to prove the sharpness of the constant 1/4 in the theorems of Hardy and of Cowling and Price for any nilpotent Lie group. These theorems are proved using a variant of Miyachi’s theorem for the group Fourier transform.

We extend an uncertainty principle due to Cowling and Price to threadlike nilpotent Lie groups. This uncertainty principle is a generalization of a classical result due to Hardy. We are thus extending earlier work on Rn and Heisenberg groups.