SGGTC this Friday: Laurent Côté and Zhenkun Li

[Oleg Lazarev]

Dear all, 

This Friday Laurent Côté from Stanford University will give a talk at 10:30 in Math 520.  Zhenkun Li from MIT will give a talk at 1:00 in Math 417. We will meet at 11:35 in the lobby and go out for lunch.

Best, 

Oleg

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Laurent Côté: Contact homology twisted by a codimension 2 submanifold

Abstract: There is a rich theory of transverse knots in 3-dimensional contact manifolds. It was a major open question in contact topology whether non-trivial transverse knots (i.e. codimension 2 contact embeddings) also exist in higher dimensions. This question was recently settled in the affirmative by Casals and Etnyre. Motivated by their result, I will talk about work in progress with Francois-Simon Fauteux-Chapleau to develop invariants of codimension 2 contact embeddings using the machinery of symplectic field theory.

Zhenkun Li: Decomposing sutured Instanton Floer homology

Abstract: Sutured Instanton Floer homology was introduced by Kronheimer and Mrowka. Though it has many important applications to the study of 3-dimensional topology, many basic aspects of the theory remain undeveloped. In this talk I will explain how to decompose sutured Instanton Floer homology with respect to properly embedded surfaces inside the sutured manifold, and present some applications of this decomposition to the development of the theory: performing some computations, bounding the depth of taut sutured manifolds, detecting the Thurston norm on link complements, and constructing some invariants for knots and links. The work is partially joint with Sudipta Ghosh.