There are many bizarre examples in the world of smooth 4-manifolds. We will describe some of these examples and discuss a tool from gauge theory that may be used to compute some of the invariants that distinguish these weird examples.
We begin with a survey of some Floer-theoretic knot concordance and homology cobordism invariants. Building on these ideas, we describe a new family of homology cobordism invariants and give a new proof that there are no 2-torsion elements with Rokhlin invariant 1. This is joint work in progress with Irving Dai, Matt Stoffregen, and Linh Truong.
Please Note: Note the different time (1:00 pm not 2:00 pm) and room (005 instead of 006).
In 1976, Thurston decidedly showed that symplectic geometry and Kähler geometry were strictly distinct by providing the first example of a compact symplectic manifold which is not symplectomorphic to any Kähler manifold. Since this example, first studied by Kodaira, much work has been done in explicating the difference between algebraic manifolds such as affine and projective varieties, complex manifolds such as Stein and Kähler manifolds, and general symplectic manifolds. By building on work first outlined by Seidel, McLean has produced numerous examples of non-affine symplectic manifolds, symplectic manifolds which are not symplectomorphic to any affine variety. McLean approached this problem via analysis of the growth rate of symplectic homology for affine varieties. Every affine variety admits a compactification to a projective variety by a normal crossing divisor. Using this fact, McLean is able to show that the symplectic homology of any affine variety must have a well-controlled growth rate.
We add a bit of subtlety to this already mysterious relationship by providing a particularly interesting example of a non-affine symplectic 4-manifold which admits many normal crossing divisor compactifications. Because of the existence of these nice compactifications, one cannot use growth rate techniques to obstruct our example from being affine and thus cannot apply the work of McLean and Seidel. Our approach to proving this results goes by considering the collection of all symplectic normal crossing divisor compactifications of a particular Liouville manifold given as a submanifold of the Kodaira-Thurston example . By studying the local geometry of a large collection of symplectic normal crossing divisors, we are able to make several topological conclusions about this collection for as well as for more general Liouville manifolds which admit similar compactifications. Our results suggest that a more subtle obstruction must exist for non-affine manifolds. If time permits, we will discuss several structural conclusions one may reach about the collection of divisor compactifications for a more general class of Liouville 4-manifolds.
Thompson links are links arising from elements of the Thompson group. They were introduced by Vaughan Jones as part of his effort to construct a conformal field theory for every finite index subfactor. In this talk I will first talk about Jones' construction of Thompson links. Then I will talk about grid diagrams and introduce a notion of half grid diagrams to give an equivalent construction of Thompson links and further associate with each Thompson link a canonical Legendrian type. Lastly, I will talk about some applications about the maximal Thurston-Bennequin number and presentation of link group. This is joint work with Yangxiao Luo.
A fundamental result in 3-dimensional contact topology due to Ding-Geiges tells us that any contact 3-manifold can be obtained via doing a surgery on a Legendrian link in the standard contact 3-sphere. So it's natural to ask how simple or complicated a surgery diagram could be for a given contact manifold? Contact surgery number is a measure of this complexity. In this talk, I will discuss this notion of complexity along with some examples. This is joint work with Marc Kegel.
The “hard direction” of the Giroux correspondence states that any two open books representing the same contact structure is related by a sequence of positive stabilisations and destabilisations. We give a proof of this statement using convex surface theory. This is a joint work with Joan Licata.
There are lots of ways to measure the complexity of a knot. Some come from knot diagrams, and others come from topological or geometric quantities extracted from some auxiliary space. In this talk, I’ll describe a geometry property, which we call “twist positivity”, that often puts strong restrictions on how the braid and bridge index are related. I’ll describe some old and new results about twist positivity, as well as some new applications towards knot concordance. In particular, I’ll describe how using a suite of numerical knot invariants (including the braid index) in tandem allows one to prove that there are infinitely many positive braid knots which all represent distinct smooth concordance classes. This confirms a prediction of the slice-ribbon conjecture. Everything I’ll discuss is joint work with Hugh Morton. I will assume very little background about knot invariants for this talk – all are welcome!
A knot K in S^3 is (smoothly) slice if K is the boundary of a properly embedded disk D in B^4, and K is ribbon if this disk can be realized without any local maxima with respect to the radial Morse function on B^4. In dimension three, a knot K with nice topology – that is, a fibered knot – bounds a unique fiber surface up to isotopy. Thus, it is natural to wonder whether this sort of simplicity could extend to the set of ribbon disks for K, arguably the simplest class of surfaces bounded by a knot in B^4. Surprisingly, we demonstrate that the square knot, one of the two non-trivial ribbon knots with the lowest crossing number, bounds infinitely many distinct ribbon disks up to isotopy. This is joint work with Jeffrey Meier.
Gromov's non-squeezing theorem established symplectic rigidity and is widely regarded as one of the most important theorems in symplectic geometry. In contrast, in the contact setting, a standard ball of any radius can be contact embedded into an arbitrarily small neighborhood of a point. Despite this flexibility, Eliashberg, Kim, and Polterovich discovered instances of contact rigidity for pre-quantized balls in $\mathbb R^{2n} \times S^1$ under a more restrictive notion of contact squeezing. In particular, in 2006 they applied holomorphic techniques to show that for any {\it integer} $R \geq 1$, there does not exist a contact squeezing of the pre-quantized ball of capacity $R$ into itself; this result was reproved by Sandon in 2011 as an application of the contact homology groups she defined using the generating family technique. Around 2016, Chiu applied the theory of microlocal sheaves to obtain the stronger result that squeezing is impossible for all $R \geq 1$. Very recently, Fraser, Sandon, and Zhang, gave an alternate proof of Chiu’s nonsqueezing result by developing an equivariant version of Sandon’s generating family contact homology groups. I will explain another proof of Chiu’s nonsqueezing, one that uses a persistence module viewpoint to extract new obstructions from the contact homology groups as defined by Sandon in 2011. This is joint work in progress with Maia Fraser.
We'll give a short description of what exactly monopole Floer spectra are, and then explain how to calculate them for AR plumbings, a class of 3-manifolds including Seifert spaces. This is joint work with Irving Dai and Hirofumi Sasahira.
