Speaker: Yu-Shen Lin (Boston University)

Title: Gravitational Instantons

Abstract: Gravitational instantons were introduced by Hawking as building blocks of his Euclidean quantum gravity theory back in the 1970s. These are non-compact Calabi-Yau surfaces with L2 curvature and thus can be viewed as the non-compact analogue of K3 surfaces. K3 surfaces are 2-dimensional Calabi-Yau manifolds and are usually the testing stone before conquering the general Calabi-Yau problems. The moduli space of K3 surfaces and its compactification on their own form important problems in various branches in geometry. In this talk, we will discuss the Torelli theorem of gravitational instantons, how the cohomological invariants of a gravitational instanton determine them. As a consequence, this leads to a description of the moduli space of gravitational instantons.