Seminars and Colloquia by Series

Identifying Dehn Functions of Bestvina--Brady Groups From Their Defining Graphs

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Monday, January 11, 2021 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
ONLINE
Speaker
Yu-Chan ChangEmory University

Please Note: https://zoom.us/j/8833025617?pwd=R1FvQWp1MVlRSTVBdFZNejE3ZURmUT09 Meeting ID: 883 302 5617

Bestvina--Brady groups are subgroups of right-angled Artin groups, and their Dehn functions are bounded above by quartic functions. There are examples of Bestvina--Brady groups whose Dehn functions are linear, quadratic, cubic, and quartic. In this talk, I will give a class of Bestvina--Brady groups that have polynomial Dehn functions, and we can identify the Dehn functions by the defining graphs of those Bestvina--Brady groups. 

Taut foliations and Dehn surgery along positive braid knots

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Monday, November 30, 2020 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
online
Speaker
Siddhi KrishnaGeorgia Tech

The L-space conjecture has been in the news a lot lately. It predicts a surprising relationship between the algebraic, geometric, and Floer-homological properties of a 3--manifold Y. In particular, it predicts exactly which 3-manifolds admit a ``taut foliation". In this talk, I'll discuss some of my past and forthcoming work investigating these connections. In particular, I'll discuss a strategy for building taut foliations manifolds obtained by Dehn surgery along knots realized as closures of ``positive braids". As an application, I will show how taut foliations can be used to obstruct positivity for cable knots. All are welcome; no background in foliation or Floer homology theories will be assumed.

https://bccte.zoom.us/j/91883463721

Meeting ID: 918 8346 3721

 

A Combinatorial Description of the knot concordance invariant epsilon

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Monday, November 9, 2020 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Speaker
Hakan DogaUniversity of Buffalo

Computing, understanding the behavior of concordance invariants obtained from knot Floer homology theories is quite central to the study of the concordance group and low-dimensional topology in general. In this talk, I will describe the method that allows us to compute the concordance invariant epsilon using combinatorial knot Floer homology and talk about some computational results. This is a joint work with S. Dey.

Knots and Links in overtwisted contact structures

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Monday, November 2, 2020 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
on line
Speaker
Rima ChatterjeeLSU

Please Note: Knots/links associated to overtwisted contact structures have been less explored. There are two types of knots/links in overtwisted contact manifolds, namely loose and non-loose. In this talk, I will start with an overview of these knots and then discuss some of my recent work involving these knots and links. Specifically, I will talk about a coarse classification result of loose, null-homologous Legendrian and transverse links . Next relating them with open book decompositions, I will show that coarse equivalence class of loose null-homologous Legendrian links has support genus zero. I will end with some interesting open questions.

Embedding closed hyperbolic 3-manifolds in small volume hyperbolic 4-manifolds

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Monday, October 26, 2020 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Michelle ChuUniversity of Illinois at Chicago

The smallest volume cusped hyperbolic 3-manifolds, the figure-eight knot complement and its sister, contain many immersed but no embedded closed totally geodesic surfaces. In this talk we discuss the existence or lack thereof of codimension-1 closed embedded totally geodesic submanifolds in minimal volume cusped hyperbolic 4-manifolds. This talk is based on joint work with Alan Reid.

Ribbon homology cobordism

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Monday, October 19, 2020 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Speaker
Shea Vela VickLouisiana State University

A cobordism between 3-manifolds is ribbon if it is built from handles of index no greater than 2. Such cobordisms arise naturally from several different topological and geometric contexts. In this talk, we discuss these objects and present a few obstructions to their existence, from Thurston geometries, character varieties, and instanton and Heegaard Floer homologies. This is joint work with Aliakbar Daemi, Tye Lidman, and Mike Wong.

A contact invariant from bordered Heegaard Floer homology

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Monday, October 12, 2020 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
https://dartmouth.zoom.us/j/98031035804?pwd=NnBpTlhVS2lzVzFWTkYyTlloeWVuQT09
Speaker
Ina PetkovaDartmouth

Given a contact structure on a bordered 3-manifold, we describe an invariant which takes values in the bordered sutured Floer homology of the manifold. This invariant satisfies a nice gluing formula, and recovers the Oszvath-Szabo contact class in Heegaard Floer homology. This is joint work with Alishahi, Foldvari, Hendricks, Licata, and Vertesi.

Zoom info:

Meeting ID: 980 3103 5804

Passcode: 196398

SL3 Skein Algebras of Surfaces by Vijay Higgins

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Monday, September 28, 2020 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Virtual
Speaker
Vijay HigginsUC Santa Barbara

The SL2 skein algebra of a surface is built from diagrams of curves on the surface. To multiply two diagrams, we draw one diagram on top of the other and then resolve the crossings with the Kauffman bracket. If we replace SL2 with another quantum group, we replace curves by embedded graphs on the surface. Recently, Thang Le showed that the SL2 skein algebra has a nice decomposition into simpler algebras whenever the surface has an ideal triangulation. This triangular decomposition is a powerful tool and should help us to study other skein algebras if we are able to show that the necessary ingredients exist. In this talk, I will explain what these ingredients are and how to find them for the SL3 skein algebra of trivalent webs on a surface.

8.3.3

The embedded contact homology of prequantization bundles

Series
Geometry Topology Seminar
Time
Monday, September 21, 2020 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
on line
Speaker
Morgan WeilerRice

The 2011 PhD thesis of Farris demonstrated that the ECH of a prequantization bundle over a Riemann surface is isomorphic as a Z/2Z-graded group to the exterior algebra of the homology of its base, the only known computation of ECH to date which does not rely on toric methods. We extend this result by computing the Z-grading on the chain complex, permitting a finer understanding of this isomorphism. We fill in some technical details, including the Morse-Bott direct limit argument and some writhe bounds. The former requires the isomorphism between filtered Seiberg-Witten Floer cohomology and filtered ECH as established by Hutchings--Taubes. The latter requires the work on higher asymptotics of pseudoholomorphic curves by Cristofaro-Gardiner--Hutchings—Zhang.

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