Higgs bundles at the Fuchsian locus

Speaker: 

Richard Wentworth

Institution: 

University of Maryland

Time: 

Tuesday, April 28, 2015 - 4:00pm

Location: 

RH 306

For a closed Riemann surface X and complex reductive Lie
group G, the moduli space of G-Higgs bundles on X
is a hyperkaehler algebraic completely integrable system
that plays an important role in moduli space theory,
representations of surface groups, and supersymmetric gauge
theories.  The uniformization of X and the choice of a principal SL2 in G
give rise to a distinguished point in the moduli space called the
Fuchsian point.  In this talk I will discuss the first order
behavior of certain geometric and dynamical quantities at the
Fuchsian point. These may be regarded as "higher" analogs of
results in Teichmueller theory and for complex projective
structures.  This is joint work with Francois Labourie.

Global existence and convergence of smooth solutions to Yang-Mills gradient flow over compact four-manifolds

Speaker: 

Paul Feehan

Institution: 

Rutgers University

Time: 

Tuesday, May 5, 2015 - 4:00pm

Location: 

RH 306

We develop new results on global existence and convergence
of solutions to the gradient flow equation for the Yang-Mills energy
functional on a principal bundle, with compact Lie structure group, over
a closed, four-dimensional, Riemannian, smooth manifold, including the
following. If the initial connection is close enough to a minimum of the
Yang-Mills energy functional, in a norm or energy sense, then the
Yang-Mills gradient flow exists for all time and converges to a
Yang-Mills connection. If the initial connection is allowed to have
arbitrary energy but we restrict to the setting of a Hermitian vector
bundle over a compact, complex, Hermitian (but not necessarily Kaehler)
surface and the initial connection has curvature of type (1,1), then the
Yang-Mills gradient flow exists for all time, though bubble
singularities may (and in certain cases must) occur in the limit as time
tends to infinity. The Lojasiewicz-Simon gradient inequality plays a crucial role in our approach and we develop two versions of that inequality for the
Yang-Mills energy functional.

 

Categories of relations in symplectic geometry

Speaker: 

Alan Weinstein

Institution: 

UC Berkeley

Time: 

Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - 4:00pm

Location: 

RH 306

Some useful ``categories" in symplectic geometry, candidates for being the domains of quantization functors, are ones in which the morphisms X --> Y between symplectic manifolds are relations, rather than maps.  These are submanifolds of X x Y having nice geometric properties with respect to the product of the symplectic form on X and the negative of the symplectic form on Y.

An obstruction to getting actual categories is that the set-theoretic composition of relations does not preserve the class of manifolds, due to possible failures of transversality.

In this talk, I will describe several approaches to resolving the transversality problem, concentrating on the linear case.  Although the composition of linear relations is always linear, the composition operation itself fails to be continuous until it is modified to take nontransversality into account.

The talk will be based in part on work with David Li-Bland and Jonathan Lorand, available on the arXiv.

On strongly minimal Kähler surfaces in C^3

Speaker: 

Bogdan Suceava

Institution: 

Cal State Fullerton

Time: 

Tuesday, April 14, 2015 - 4:00pm

Location: 

RH 306

Pursuing an idea motivated by a question of S.-S. Chern from 1968 on the existence of
intrinsic Riemannian obstructions to minimality [Chern, S.-S.: Minimal submanifolds
in a Riemannian manifold (1968)], an important study of the very idea of curvature
was deepened after 1993 by B.-Y. Chen, then by other authors. In the last two decades,
B.-Y. Chen’s fundamental inequalities have been investigated by many authors in the
context of various geometric structures. In this talk, we start by presenting B.-Y. Chen’s
fundamental inequality for Kähler submanifolds in complex space forms, and we recall
why the case of Kähler surfaces in C^3 satisfying scal(p) = 4 inf sec(π^r ) appears
naturally and is important. Then we provide several characterizations of strongly minimal
complex surfaces in the complex three dimensional space. We focus our study on the question
of finding further examples of strongly minimal Kähler surfaces, as the question of a
complete classification of these geometric objects is still open.

Star-shaped mean curvature flow

Speaker: 

Longzhi Lin

Institution: 

UC Santa Cruz

Time: 

Tuesday, March 3, 2015 - 4:00pm to 5:00pm

Host: 

Location: 

RH 306

A one-parameter family of hypersurfaces in Euclidean space evolves by mean curvature flow if the velocity at each point is given by the mean curvature vector. It can be viewed as a geometric heat equation, i.e., it is locally moving in the direction of steepest descent for the volume element, deforming surfaces towards optimal ones (minimal surfaces). In this talk we will discuss some recent work on the local curvature estimate and convexity estimate for the star-shaped mean curvature flow and the consequences. In particular, star-shaped MCF is generic in the sense of Colding-Minicozzi. This is joint work with Robert Haslhofer. 

Some applications of time derivative bound to Ricci flow

Speaker: 

Qi S. Zhang

Institution: 

UC Riverside

Time: 

Tuesday, January 13, 2015 - 3:00pm

Host: 

Location: 

RH 306

We present a joint work with Richard Bamler.
We consider Ricci flows that satisfy certain scalar curvature bounds. It is found that the time derivative for the solution of the heat equation and the curvature tensor have better than expected bounds. Based on these, we derive a number results. They are: bounds on distance distortion at different times and Gaussian bounds for the heat kernel, backward pseudolocality, L^2-curvature bounds in
dimension 4.

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