Max Planck Institute Bonn

TBA

We will first construct pairs of homotopic 2-spheres smoothly embedded in a 4-manifold that are smoothly equivalent (via an ambient diffeomorphism preserving homology) but not even topologically isotopic. Indeed, these examples show that Gabai's recent "4D Lightbulb Theorem" does not hold without the 2-torsion hypothesis. We will proceed to discuss two distinct ways of obstructing such an isotopy, as well as related invariants which can be used to obstruct an isotopy between pairs of properly embedded disks (rather than spheres) in a 4-manifold.

At the end of the 70s, Gross and Deligne conjectured that periods of geometric Hodge structures with multiplication by an abelian number field are always products of values of the gamma function at rational numbers, with exponents determined by the Hodge decomposition. I will explain a proof of an alternating variant of this conjecture for the cohomology groups of smooth, projective varieties over the algebraic numbers acted upon by a finite order automorphism.