University of Glasgow

Conditional on finiteness of relevant Shafarevich--Tate groups, Harpaz and Skorobogatov established the Hasse principle for Kummer varieties associated to a 2-covering of a principally polarised abelian variety A, under certain large image assumptions on the Galois action on A[2]. However, their method stops short of treating the case where the image is the full symplectic group, due to the possible failure of the Shafarevich--Tate group to have square order in this setting. I will explain work in progress which overcomes this obstruction by combining second descent ideas of Harpaz with new results on the 2-parity conjecture. 

It is well known that if a group von Neumann algebra of a (nontrivial) discrete group is a factor, then it is a factor of type II_1. During the talk, I will answer the following question: which types appear as types of injective factors being group von Neumann algebras of discrete quantum groups (or looking from the dual perspective - von Neumann algebras of bounded functions on compact quantum groups)? An important object in our work is the subgroup of real numbers t for which the scaling automorphism tau_t is inner. This is joint work with Piotr Sołtan.

 I will discuss ongoing work with Toke Carlsen and Aidan Sims on ideal structure of C*-algebras of commuting local homeomorphisms. This is one aspect of a general attempt to bridge C*-algebras with multidimensional (symbolic) dynamics.

A Hausdorff and etale groupoid is said to be C*-simple if its reduced groupoid C*-algebra is simple. Work on C*-simplicity goes back to the work of Kalantar and Kennedy in 2014, who classified the C*-simplicity of discrete groups by associating to the group a dynamical system. Since then, the study of C*-simplicity has received interest from group theorists and operator algebraists alike. More recently, the works of Kawabe and Borys demonstrate that the groupoid case may be tractible to such dynamical characterizations. In this talk, we present the dynamical characterization of when a groupoid is C*-simple and work out some basic examples. This is joint work with Xin Li, Matt Kennedy, Sven Raum, and Dan Ursu. No previous knowledge of groupoids will be assumed.

Together with Alex Degtyarev and Vincent Florence we introduced a new link invariant, called slope, of a colored link in an integral homology sphere. In this talk I will define the invariant, highlight some of its most interesting properties as well as its relationship to Conway polynomials and to the  Kojima–Yamasaki eta-function. The stress in this talk will be on our latest computational progress: a formula to calculate the slope from a C-complex.

The recent work on nc convex sets of Davidson, Kennedy, and Shamovich show that there is a rich interplay between the category of operator systems and the category of compact nc convex sets, leading to new insights even in the case of C*-algebras. The category of nc convex sets are a generalization of the usual notion of a compact convex set that provides meaningful connections between convex theoretic notions and notions in operator system theory. In this talk, we present a duality theorem for norm closed self-adjoint subspaces of B(H) that do not necessarily contain the unit. Using this duality, we will describe various C*-algebraic and operator system theoretic notions such as simplicity and subkernels in terms of their convex structure. This is joint work with Matthew Kennedy and Nicholas Manor.

I will give an introduction to semigroup C*-algebras of ax+b-semigroups over rings of algebraic integers in algebraic number fields, a class of C*-algebras that was introduced by Cuntz, Deninger, and Laca. After explaining the construction, I will briefly discuss the state-of-the-art for this example class: These C*-algebras are unital, separable, nuclear, strongly purely infinite, and have computable primitive ideal spaces. In many cases, e.g., for Galois extensions, they completely characterise the underlying algebraic number field.

Having its roots in classical operator theoretic questions, the theory of extensions of C*-algebras is now a powerful tool with applications in geometry and topology and of course within the theory of C*-algebras itself. In this talk I will give a gentle introduction to the topic highlighting some classical results and more recent applications and questions.

This talk will give an easy introduction to non-commutative L_p spaces associated with a tracial von Neumann algebra. Then I will focus on non-commutative L_p spaces associated to locally compact groups and talk about some interesting completely bounded multipliers on them.

C*-algebras constructed from topological groupoids allow us to study many interesting and a priori very different constructions
of C*-algebras in a common framework. Moreover, they are general enough to appear intrinsically in the theory. In particular, it was recently shown
by Xin Li that all C*-algebras falling within the scope of the classification program admit (twisted) groupoid models.
In this talk I will give a gentle introduction to this class of C*-algebras and discuss some of their structural properties, which appear in connection
with the classification program.