Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

In this series of talks I will begin by discussing the idea of studying smooth manifolds and their submanifolds using the symplectic (and contact) geometry of their cotangent bundles. I will then discuss Legendrian contact homology, a powerful invariant of Legendrian submanifolds of contact manifolds.

TBA

This is continuation of talk from last week. Periodic orbits of flows on $3$ manifolds show very rich structure. In this talk we will try to prove a theorem of Ghrist, which states that, there exists vector fields on $S^3$ whose set of periodic orbits contains every possible knot and link in $S^3$. The proof relies on template theory.

We introduce a new surgery operation for contact manifolds called the Liouville connect sum. This operation -- which includes Weinstein handle attachment as a special case -- is designed to study the relationship between contact topology and symplectomorphism groups established by work of Giroux and Thurston-Winkelnkemper. The Liouville connect sum is used to generalize results of Baker-Etnyre-Van Horn-Morris and Baldwin on the existence of "monodromy multiplication cobordisms" as well as results of Seidel regarding squares of symplectic Dehn twists.

Given any smooth manifold, there is a canonical symplectic structure on its cotangent bundle. A long standing idea of Arnol'd suggests that the symplectic topology of the cotangent bundle should contain a great deal of information about the smooth topology of its base. As a contrast, I show that when X is an open 4-manifold, this symplectic structure on T^*X does not depend on the choice of smooth structure on X. I will also discuss the particular cases of smooth structures on R^4 and once-punctured compact 4-manifolds.

In this series of talks I will begin by discussing the idea of studying smooth manifolds and their submanifolds using the symplectic (and contact) geometry of their cotangent bundles. I will then discuss Legendrian contact homology, a powerful invariant of Legendrian submanifolds of contact manifolds.

In this talk we are going to present a theorem that can be seen as related to S. Smale's theorem on the topology of the space of Legendrian loops. The framework will be slightly different and the space of Legendrian curves will be replaced by a smaller space $C_{\beta}$, that appears to be convenient in some variational problems in contact form geometry. We will also talk about the applications and the possible extensions of this result. This is a joint work with V. Martino.

We look at a paper of McMullen "Braid Groups and Hodge Theory" exploring representations of braid groups and their connections to arithemetic lattices.