New approach to character varieties: nilpotent is the new holomorphic
- Series
- Geometry Topology Seminar
- Time
- Monday, March 13, 2023 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
- Location
- Skiles 006
- Speaker
- Alexander Thomas – U. Heidelberg – athomas@mathi.uni-heidelberg.de
The study of representations of fundamental groups of surfaces into Lie groups is captured by the character variety. One main tool to study character varieties are Higgs bundles, a complex geometric tool. They fail to see the mapping class group symmetry. I will present an alternative approach which replaces Higgs bundles by so-called higher complex structures, given in terms of commuting nilpotent matrices. The resulting theory has many similarities to the non-abelian Hodge theory. Joint with Georgios Kydonakis and Charlie Reid.