Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

We study a particular distinguished component (the 'Hitchin component') of the space of surface group representations to SL(3,\R).  In this setting, both Hitchin (via Higgs bundles) and the more ancient subject of affine spheres associate a bundle of holomorphic differentials over Teichmuller space to this component of the character variety.  We focus on a ray of holomorphic differentials and provide a formula, tropical in appearance, for the asymptotic holonomy of the representations in terms of the local geometry of the differential.  Alternatively, we show how t

A map (respectively, a unicellular map) on a genus g surface Sg is the Homeo+(Sg)-orbit of a graph G embedded on Sg such that Sg-G is a collection of finitely many disks (respectively, a single disk). The study of maps was initiated by W. Tutte, who was interested in counting the number of planar maps. However, we will consider maps from a more graph theoretic perspective in this talk. We will introduce a topological operation called surgery, which turns one unicellular map into another.

This talk will focus on surfaces (orientable connected 2-manifolds) with noncompact boundary. Since a general surface with noncompact boundary can be extremely complicated, we will first consider a particular class called Sliced Loch Ness Monsters. We will discuss how to show the mapping class group of any Sliced Loch Ness Monster is uniformly perfect and automatically continuous.

Zoom Link- https://gatech.zoom.us/j/97563537012?pwd=dlBVUVh2ZDNwdDRrajdQcDltMmRaUT09 (Meeting ID: 975 6353 7012 Passcode: 525012)

We first construct a complex surface with positive signature, which is a ball quotient. We obtain it as an abelian Galois cover of CP^2 branched over the Hesse arrangement. Then we analyze its fibration structure, and by using it we build new symplectic and also non-symplectic exotic 4-manifolds with positive signatures.