Past Geometry and Analysis Seminar

Lagrangian Floer cohomology can be enriched by using local coefficients to record some homotopy data about the boundaries of the holomorphic disks counted by the theory. In this talk I will explain how one can do this under the monotonicity assumption and when the Lagrangians are equipped with local systems of rank higher than one. The presence of holomorphic discs of Maslov index 2 poses a potential obstruction to such an extension. However, for an appropriate choice of local systems the obstruction might vanish and, if not,
one can always restrict to some natural unobstructed subcomplexes. I will showcase these constructions with some explicit calculations for the Chiang Lagrangian in CP^3 showing that it cannot be disjoined from RP^3 by a Hamiltonian isotopy, answering a question of Evans-Lekili. Time permitting, I will also discuss some work-in-progress on the topology of monotone Lagrangians in CP^3, part of which follows from more general joint work with Jack Smith on the topology of monotone Lagrangians of maximal Maslov number in
projective spaces.

Stability conditions on derived categories of algebraic varieties and their wall-crossings have given algebraic geometers a number of new tools to study the geometry of moduli spaces of stable sheaves. In work in progress with Macri, Lahoz, Nuer, Perry and Stellari, we are extending this toolkit to a the "relative" setting, i.e. for a family of varieties. Our construction comes with relative moduli spaces of stable objects; this gives additional ways of constructing new families of varieties from a given family, thereby potentially relating different moduli spaces of varieties.

I present recently developed iterated residue formulas for tautological integrals over Hilbert schemes of points on  smooth  manifolds. Applications include curve and hypersurface counting formulas. Joint work with Andras Szenes.

A C^infinity scheme is a version of a scheme that uses a maximal spectrum. The category of C^infinity schemes contains the category of Manifolds as a full subcategory, as well as being closed under fibre products. In other words, this category is equipped to handle intersection singularities of smooth spaces.

While originally defined in the set up of Synthetic Differential Geometry, C^infinity schemes have more recently been used to describe derived manifolds, for example, the d-manifolds of Joyce. There are applications of this in Symplectic Geometry, such as the describing the moduli space of J-holomorphic forms.

In this talk, I will describe the category of C^infinity schemes, and how this idea can be extended to manifolds with corners. If time, I will mention the applications of this in derived geometry.

We study Brownian motion and stochastic parallel transport on Perelman's almost Ricci flat manifold,  whose dimension depends on a parameter $N$ unbounded from above. By taking suitable projections we construct sequences of space-time Brownian motion and stochastic parallel transport whose limit as $N\to \infty$ are the corresponding objects for the Ricci flow. In order to make precise this process of passing to the limit, we study the martingale problems for the Laplace operator on Perelman’s manifold and for the horizontal Laplacian on the corresponding orthonormal frame bundle.

As an application, we see how the characterizations of two-sided bounds on the Ricci curvature established by A. Naber applied to Perelman's manifold lead to the inequalities that characterize solutions of the Ricci flow discovered by Naber and Haslhofer.

This is joint work with Robert Haslhofer.

Symplectic reduction is the natural quotient construction for symplectic manifolds. Given a free and proper action of a Lie group G on a symplectic manifold M, this process produces a new symplectic manifold of dimension dim(M) - 2 dim(G). For non-free actions, however, the result is usually fairly singular. But Sjamaar-Lerman (1991) showed that the singularities can be understood quite precisely: symplectic reductions by non-free actions are partitioned into smooth symplectic manifolds, and these manifolds fit nicely together in the sense that they form a stratification.

Symplectic reduction has an analogue in hyperkähler geometry, which has been a very important tool for constructing new examples of these special manifolds. In this talk, I will explain how Sjamaar-Lerman’s results can be extended to this setting, namely, hyperkähler quotients by non-free actions are stratified
spaces whose strata are hyperkähler.

3d N=4 supersymmetric gauge theories provide a method for constructing HyperK\”ahler singularities, known as the Coulomb branch.
This method is complementary to the more traditional way of construction using HyperK\”ahler quotients, known in physics as the “Higgs branch”.
Out of all possible gauge theories there is an interesting subclass of quiver varieties, where the Coulomb branch has been studied in some detail.
Some examples are moduli spaces of classical and exceptional instantons and closures of nilpotent orbits. An interesting feature of Coulomb and Higgs branches is the phenomenon of "3d mirror symmetry” where for a pair of gauge theories, the Higgs branch and Coulomb branch exchange.
There is a large class of “mirror pairs” which I will discuss in some detail.

A topic of recent interest is the notion of implosions. I will argue that there is a simple operation on the quiver which leads to implosion. In other words, given a quiver such that its Coulomb branch is moduli space A, a simple operation of the quiver (making a bouquet) provides the implosion of A.
This has been tested on closures of nilpotent orbits of A type and on nilpotent cones of orthogonal groups and found to agree with the expected results.
If time permits, I will discuss isometries of Coulomb branches

For many moduli problems, in order to construct a moduli space as a geometric invariant theory quotient, one needs to impose a notion of (semi)stability. Using recent results in non-reductive geometric invariant theory, we explain how to stratify certain moduli stacks in such a way that each stratum admits a coarse moduli space which is constructed as a geometric quotient of an action of a linear algebraic group with internally graded unipotent radical. As many stacks are
naturally filtered by quotient stacks, this involves describing how to stratify certain quotient stacks. Even for quotient stacks for reductive group actions, we see that non-reductive GIT is required to construct the coarse moduli spaces of the higher strata. We illustrate this point by studying the example of the moduli stack of coherent sheaves over a projective scheme. This is joint work with G. Berczi, J. Jackson and F. Kirwan.

I will talk about recent work, joint with M. Gröchenig and D. Wyss, on two related results involving the cohomology of moduli spaces of Higgs bundles. The first is a positive answer to a conjecture of Hausel and Thaddeus which predicts the equality of suitably defined Hodge numbers of moduli spaces of Higgs bundles with SL(n)- and PGL(n)-structure. The second is a new proof of Ngô's geometric stabilization theorem which appears in the proof of the fundamental lemma. I will give an introduction to these theorems and outline our argument, which, inspired by work of Batyrev, proceeds by comparing the number of points of these moduli spaces over finite fields via p-adic integration.

In real dimension two, the symplectic mapping class group of a surface agrees with its `classical' mapping class group, whose properties are well-understood. To what extend do these generalise to higher-dimensions? We consider specific pairs of symplectic manifolds (S, M), where S is a surface, together with collections of Lagrangian spheres in S and in M, say v_1, ...,v_k and V_1, ...,V_k, that have analogous intersection patterns, in a sense that we will make precise. Our main theorem is that any relation between the Dehn twists in the V_i must also hold between Dehn twists in the v_i. Time allowing, we will give some corollaries, such as embeddings of certain interesting groups into auto-equivalence groups of Fukaya categories.

First, we will discuss sequences of closed minimal hypersurfaces (in closed Riemannian manifolds of dimension up to 7) that have uniformly bounded index and area. In particular, we explain a bubbling result which yields a bound on the total curvature along the sequence and, as a consequence, topological control in terms of index and area. We then specialise to minimal surfaces in ambient manifolds of dimension 3, where we use the bubbling analysis to obtain smooth multiplicity-one convergence under bounds on the index and genus. This is joint work with Lucas Ambrozio, Alessandro Carlotto, and Ben Sharp

 The basic algebra-geometry dictionary for finitely generated k-algebras is one of the triumphs of 19th and early 20th century mathematics.  However, classes of related rings, such as their k-subalgebras, lack clean general properties or organizing principles, even when they arise naturally in problems of smooth projective geometry.  “Stabilization” in smooth topology and symplectic geometry, achieved by products with Euclidean space, substantially simplifies many
problems.  We discuss an analog in the more rigid setting of algebraic and arithmetic geometry, which, among other things (e.g., applications to counting rational points), gives some structure to the study of k-subalgebras.  We focus on the case of the moduli space of stable rational n-pointed curves to illustrate.

A bold conjecture of Boyer-Gorden-Watson and others posit that for any irreducible rational homology 3-sphere M the following three conditions are equivalent: (1) the fundamental group of M is left-orderable, (2) M has non-minimal Heegaard Floer homology, and (3) M admits a co-orientable taut foliation. Very recently, this conjecture was established for all graph manifolds by the combined work of Boyer-Clay and Hanselman-Rasmussen-Rasmussen-Watson. I will discuss a computational survey of these properties involving half a million hyperbolic 3-manifolds, including new or at least improved techniques for computing each of these properties.
 

In this talk two different methods for constructing complete steady and expanding Ricci solitons of cohomogeneity one will be discussed. The first is based on an estimate on the growth of the soliton potential and holds for large classes of cohomogeneity one manifolds. The second approach is specific to the two summands case and uses a Lyapunov function. This method also carries over to the Einstein case and as an application, a simplified construction of B\"ohm's Einstein metrics of positive scalar curvature on spheres will be explained.

Associated to a finite graph without loops is the Kac-Moody Lie algebra for the Cartan matrix whose off diagonal entries are (minus) the adjacency matrix for the graph.  Two famous conjectures of Kac, proved by Hausel, Letellier and Villegas, hint that there may be some larger cohomologically graded algebra associated to the graph (even if there are loops), providing "higher" Kac moody Lie algebras, or at least their positive halves.  Using work with Sven Meinhardt, I will give a geometric construction of the (full) Kac-Moody algebra for a general finite graph, using cohomological DT theory.  Along the way we'll see a proof of the positivity conjecture for the modified Kac polynomials of Bozec, Schiffmann and Vasserot counting various types of representations of quivers.

A generic surface homeomorphism (up to isotopy) is what we call it pseudo-Anosov. These maps come equipped with an algebraic integer that measures
how much the map stretches/shrinks in different direction, called the stretch factor. Given a surface homeomorsphism, one can ask if it is the lift (by a branched or unbranched cover) of another homeomorphism on a simpler surface possibly of small genus. Farb conjectured that if the algebraic degree of the stretch factor is bounded above, then the map can be obtained by lifting another homeomorphism on a surface of bounded genus.
This was known to be true for quadratic algebraic integers by a Theorem of Franks-Rykken. We construct counterexamples to Farb's conjecture.

We give new obstructions to the existence of planar open books on contact structures, in terms of the homology of their fillings. I will talk about applications to links of surface singularities, Seifert fibred spaces, and integer homology spheres. No prior knowledge of contact or symplectic topology will be assumed. This is joint work with Paolo Ghiggini and Olga Plamenevskaya.
 

We show that a closed almost Kähler 4-manifold of globally constant holomorphic sectional curvature k<=0 with respect to the canonical Hermitian connection is automatically Kähler. The same result holds for k < 0 if we require in addition that the Ricci curvature is J-invariant. The proofs are based on the observation that such manifolds are self-dual, so that Chern–Weil theory implies useful integral formulas, which are then combined with results from Seiberg–Witten theory.

While many cubic fourfolds are known to be rational, it is expected that the very general cubic fourfold is irrational (although none have been
proven to be so). There is a conjecture for precisely which cubics are rational, which can be expressed in Hodge-theoretic terms (by work of Hassett)
or in terms of derived categories (by work of Kuznetsov). The conjecture can be phrased as saying that one can associate a `noncommutative K3 surface' to any cubic fourfold, and the rational ones are precisely those for which this noncommutative K3 is `geometric', i.e., equivalent to an honest K3 surface. It turns out that the noncommutative K3 associated to a cubic fourfold has a conjectural symplectic mirror (due to  Batyrev-Borisov). In contrast to the algebraic side of the story, the mirror is always `geometric': i.e., it is always just an honest K3 surface equipped with an appropriate Kähler form. After explaining this background, I will state a theorem: homological mirror symmetry holds in this context (joint work with Ivan Smith).

G2-manifolds are the Riemannian 7-manifolds with G2 holonomy and in many respects can be regarded as 7-dimensional analogues of Calabi-Yau 3-folds.
In joint work with Mark Haskins and Johannes Nordström we construct infinitely many families of new complete non-compact G2 manifolds (only four such manifolds were previously known). The underlying smooth 7-manifolds are all circle bundles over asymptotically conical Calabi-Yau 3-folds. The metrics are circle-invariant and have an asymptotic geometry that is the 7-dimensional analogue of the geometry of 4-dimensional ALF hyperkähler metrics. After describing the main features of our construction I will concentrate on some illustrative examples, describing how results in Calabi-Yau geometry about isolated singularities and their resolutions can be used to produce examples of complete G2-manifolds.

A Morse function (and more generally a Morse-Bott function) on a compact manifold M has associated Morse inequalities. The aim of this
talk is to explain how we can associate Morse inequalities to any smooth function on M (reporting on work of/with G Penington).

We describe a general program for the classification of flat connections on topological manifolds. This is motivated by the classification of locally homogeneous geometric structures on manifolds, in the spirit of Ehresmann and Thurston.  This leads to interesting dynamical systems arising from mapping class group actions on character varieties. The mapping class group action is a discrete version of a continuous object, namely the extension of the Teichmueller flow to a  unversal character variety over over the tangent bundle of Teichmuller space. We give several examples of this construction
and discuss joint work with Giovanni Forni on a mixing property of this suspended flow.

The theory of connections on curves and Hitchin systems is something like a “global theory of Lie groups”, where one works over a Riemann surface rather than just at a point. We’ll describe how one can take this analogy a few steps further by attempting to make precise the class of rich geometric objects that appear in this story (including the non-compact case), and discuss their classification, outlining a theory of “Dynkin diagrams” as a step towards classifying some examples of such objects.

I shall discuss Zauner's conjecture about the existence of n^2 mutually equidistant points in complex projective space CP^{n-1} with its standard Fubini-Study metric. This is the so-called SIC-POVM problem, and is related to properties of the moment mapping that embeds CP^{n-1} into the Lie algebra su(n). In the case n=3, there is an obvious 1-parameter family of such sets of 9 points under the action of SU(3) and we shall sketch a proof that there are no others. This is joint work with Lane Hughston.

The moduli space M(G) of Higgs bundles for a complex reductive group G on a compact Riemann surface carries a natural hyperkahler structure and it comes equipped with an algebraically completely integrable system through a flat projective morphism called the Hitchin map. Motivated by mirror symmetry, I will discuss certain complex Lagrangians (BAA-branes) in M(G) coming from real forms of G and give a proposal for the mirror (BBB-brane) in the moduli space of Higgs bundles for the Langlands dual group of G.  In this talk, I will focus on the real groups SU^*(2m), SO^*(4m) and Sp(m,m). The image under the Hitchin map of Higgs bundles for these groups is completely contained in the discriminant locus of the base and our analysis is carried out by describing the whole
(singular) fibres they intersect. These turn out to be certain subvarieties of the moduli space of rank 1 torsion-free sheaves on a non-reduced curve. If time permits we will also discuss another class of complex Lagrangians in M(G) which can be constructed from symplectic representations of G.