Seminar series
Date
Mon, 20 Oct 2008
Time
14:15 -
14:45
Location
L3
Speaker
Stefan Friedl
Organisation
Warwick
It is a classical result that the Alexander polynomial of a fibered knot has to be monic. But in general the converse does not hold, i.e. the Alexander polynomial does not detect fibered knots. We will show that the collection of all twisted Alexander polynomials (which are a natural generalization of the ordinary Alexander polynomial) detect fibered 3-manifolds.
As a corollary it follows that given a 3-manifold N the product S1 x N is symplectic if and only if N is fibered.