Please note that the list below only shows forthcoming events, which may not include regular events that have not yet been entered for the forthcoming term. Please see the past events page for a list of all seminar series that the department has on offer.

 

Past events in this series


Mon, 26 May 2025
14:15
L5

Towards a gauge-theoretic approximation of codimension-three area

Alessandro Pigati
(Bocconi University)
Abstract

In the last three decades, a fruitful way to approximate the area functional in low codimension is to interpret submanifolds as the nodal sets of maps (or sections of vector bundles), critical for suitable physical energies or well-known lagrangians from gauge theory. Inspired by the situation in codimension two, where the abelian Higgs model has provided a successful framework, we look at the non-abelian SU(2) model as a natural candidate in codimension three. In this talk we will survey the new key difficulties and some recent partial results, including a joint work with D. Parise and D. Stern and another result by Y. Li.

Mon, 02 Jun 2025
14:15
L5

Laplacian spectra of minimal submanifolds in the hyperbolic space

Gerasim Kokarev
(Leeds)
Abstract
I will describe an extremal problem for the fundamental tone of submanifolds in the hyperbolic space, and will show that singular minimal submanifolds occur as natural maximisers for it. I will also discuss a closely related rigidity phenomenon for the Laplacian spectra of minimal submanifolds.
Mon, 09 Jun 2025
12:15
L5

$3$-$(\alpha,\delta)$-Sasaki manifolds and strongly positive curvature

Ilka Agricola
(Philipps-Universität Marburg)
Abstract
$3$-$(\alpha,\delta)$-Sasaki manifolds are a natural generalisation of $3$-Sasaki manifolds, which in dimension $7$ are intricately related to $G_2$ geometry. We show how these are closely related to various types of quaternionic Kähler orbifolds via connections with skew-torsion and an interesting canonical submersion. Making use of this relation we discuss curvature operators and show that in dimension 7 many such manifolds have strongly positive curvature, a notion originally introduced by Thorpe.