Member Seminar Speaker: Chuck Doran Title: The Greene-Plesser Construction Revisited Abstract: The first known construction of mirror pairs of Calabi-Yau manifolds was the Greene-Plesser “quotient and resolve” procedure which applies to pencils of hypersurfaces in projective space. We’ll review this approach, uncover the hints it gives for some more general mirror constructions, and describe a brand-new variant […]
Abstract: Localization by cosection, first introduced by Kiem-Li in 2010, is one of the fundamental techniques used to study invariants in complex enumerative geometry. Donaldson-Thomas (DT) invariants counting sheaves on Calabi-Yau fourfolds were first defined by Borisov-Joyce in 2015 by combining derived algebraic and differential geometry. In this talk, we develop the theory of cosection localization […]
Speaker: Michail Savvas, UT Austin Title: Cosection localization for virtual fundamental classes of d-manifolds and Donaldson-Thomas invariants of Calabi-Yau fourfolds Abstract: Localization by cosection, first introduced by Kiem-Li in 2010, is one of the fundamental techniques used to study invariants in complex enumerative geometry. Donaldson-Thomas (DT) invariants counting sheaves on Calabi-Yau fourfolds were first defined by Borisov-Joyce […]
Speaker: Peter Keevash, Oxford Title: Hypergraph decompositions and their applications Abstract: Many combinatorial objects can be thought of as a hypergraph decomposition, i.e. a partition of (the edge set of) one hypergraph into (the edge sets of) copies of some other hypergraphs. For example, a Steiner Triple System is equivalent to a decomposition of a complete graph […]
Abstract: Fix a Calabi-Yau 3-fold X. Its DT invariants count stable bundles and sheaves on X. The generalised DT invariants of Joyce-Song count semistable bundles and sheaves on X. I will describe work with Soheyla Feyzbakhsh showing these generalised DT invariants in any rank r can be written in terms of rank 1 invariants. By the […]
Abstract: Teukolsky equation in Kerr spacetimes governs the dynamics of the spin $s$ components, $s=0, \pm 1, \pm 2$ corresponding to the scalar field, the Maxwell field, and the linearized gravity, respectively. I will discuss recent joint work with L. Zhang on proving the precise asymptotic profiles for these spin $s$ components in Schwarzschild and […]
Abstract: Active crystals are highly ordered structures that emerge from the nonequilibrium self-organization of motile objects, and have been widely studied in synthetic and bacterial active matter. In this talk, I will describe how swimming sea star embryos spontaneously assemble into chiral crystals that span thousands of spinning organisms and persist for tens of hours. Combining […]
Title: The Kervaire conjecture and the minimal complexity of surfaces Abstract: We use topological methods to solve special cases of a fundamental problem in group theory, the Kervaire conjecture. The conjecture asserts that, for any nontrivial group G and any element w in the free product G*Z, the quotient (G*Z)/<<w>> is still nontrivial. We interpret this […]
Member Seminar Speaker: Gabriel Wong Title: Universal relations between entanglement, symmetries, and entropy Abstract: Entanglement is an essential property of quantum systems that distinguishes them from classical ones. It is responsible for the nonlocal character of quantum information and provides a resource for quantum teleportation and quantum computation. In this talk I will provide an introduction […]
Speaker: Jeongwan Haah (Microsoft) Title: A degeneracy bound for homogeneous topological order https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjHJa-hy-3o
This week’s seminar will be an open mic discussion which will be led by Nima Arkani-Hamed (IAS), and by Gary Shiu (UW-Madison), and the topic will be “Swampland constraints, Unitarity and Causality”. They will start with a brief introduction sharing their thoughts about the topic and moderate a discussion afterwards.