Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

A result by Ozsvath and Szabo states that the knot Floer complex of an L-space knot is a staircase. In this talk, we will discuss a similar result for two-component L-space links: the link Floer complex of such links can be thought of as an array of staircases. We will describe an algorithm to extract this array directly from the H-function of the link. As an application, we will discuss how to use this and the link surgery formula to compute the knot Floer complex and the tau-invariant of a certain class of satellite knots. This is joint work with Ian Zemke and Hugo Zhou.

Vanishing cycles of Lefschetz fibrations give examples of Lagrangian spheres in the fiber. A natural question, first raised by Donaldson, is whether all Lagrangian spheres arise this way. We focus on this problem for positive rational surfaces, which were shown to admit a geometric structure called almost toric fibrations. I will talk about a work-in-progress showing all Lagrangian spheres here are visible in an almost toric fibration and thus are vanishing cycles of a nodal degeneration.

An Anosov representation of a hyperbolic group $\Gamma$ is a representation which quasi-isometrically embeds $\Gamma$ into a semisimple Lie group - say, SL(d, R) - in a way which imitates and generalizes the behavior of a convex cocompact group acting on a hyperbolic metric space. It is unknown whether every linear hyperbolic group admits an Anosov representation. In this talk, I will discuss joint work with Sami Douba, Balthazar Flechelles, and Feng Zhu, which shows that every hyperbolic group that acts geometrically on a CAT(0) cube complex admits a 1-Anosov representation into SL(d, R) for some d. Mainly, the proof exploits the relationship between the combinatorial/CAT(0) geometry of right-angled Coxeter groups and the projective geometry of a convex domain in real projective space on which a Coxeter group acts by reflections.