Lefschetz Fibrations and Exotic 4-Manifolds I

Series
Geometry Topology Working Seminar
Time
Friday, March 10, 2023 - 2:00pm for 1.5 hours (actually 80 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Nur Saglam
Organizer
John Etnyre

Lefschetz fibrations are very useful in the sense that they have one-one correspondence with the relations in the Mapping Class Groups and they can be used to construct exotic (homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic) 4-manifolds. In this series of talks, we will first introduce Lefschetz fibrations and Mapping Class Groups and give examples. Then, we will dive more into 4-manifold world. More specifically, we will talk about the history of  exotic 4-manifolds and we will define the nice tools used to construct exotic 4-manifolds, like symplectic normal connect sum, Rational Blow-Down, Luttinger Surgery, Branch Covers, and Knot Surgery. Finally, we will provide various constructions of exotic 4-manifolds.