Symplectic Topology Seminar  2011-2012

The seminar meets every two weeks on Mondays, from 15:00 to 16:00 in 4336 AA.

This academic year at UdeM there is a working group on mirror symmetry. More information is here.

Fall 2011
September 12	Paul Biran  (ETH Zurich)  Quantum homology and projective duality
September 26	Roman Golovko (UdeM/UQAM) On Lagrangian cobordisms between Legendrian submanifolds of R^{2n+1}
October 10	Steven Sivek (Harvard) Monopole Floer homology and Legendrian knots Abstract: We will define invariants of Legendrian knots using Kronheimer and Mrowka's construction of monopole Floer homology for sutured manifolds. These invariants have several interesting properties: their behavior under stabilization and contact surgery suggests that they are closely related to the Lisca-Ozsvath-Stipsicz-Szabo invariant in knot Floer homology, and they are functorial with respect to Lagrangian concordance.  As an application, we will construct many examples of non-loose knots in overtwisted contact manifolds.
October 24	Al Momin  (Purdue) Periodic Reeb orbits in the complement of a Hopf link Abstract: This is joint work with Pedro Salamao and Umberto Hryniewicz. Suppose X is the Reeb vector field of a tight contact form on S^3, and that X has a pair of periodic orbits forming a (maximal self-linking) Hopf link. If a certain precise 'resonance' condition on the Conley-Zehnder indices of the orbits is broken then we will see how contact homology can tell us that X has infinitely many other closed orbits which are distinguished by how they link with the hypothetical Hopf link. We will also see how this relates to a problem of geodesics of metrics on S^2 analogous to a result obtained by Angenent using curve-shortening.
November 7	Yasha Savelyev (CRM/UdeM ) Gromov K-area and jumping curves Abstract: We relate a certain Riemannian and symplectic invariant of manifolds, called Gromov K-area, to symplectic rigidity, and jumping curves in CP^n. The story is interestingly tied up with Bott periodicity and Gromov-Witten invariants.
November 21	Songhao Travis Li (Toronto) The symplectic groupoids of b-symplectic Poisson manifolds
December 5	!Cancelled!
Spring 2012
January 16	Jean-Francois Barraud (Toulouse ) Enriching Floer homology with higher dimensional moduli spaces beyond bubbles Abstract: Joint work in progress with O. Cornea. I will recall how the usual Floer complex can be enriched to take higher dimensional moduli spaces into account, leading to a Floer analog of the Leray-Serre spectral sequence. In the presence of holomorphic spheres however, this original construction dies at the first bubble and leads to a truncated spectral sequence only. I will explain a strategy to handle the bubbling phenomenon to derive a full spectral sequence that survives the bubbles. The main ingredient will be the idea introduced  by O. Cornea and F. Lalonde of using a Morse function and a cluster like complex to control the bubbling locus.
January 30	!Cancelled!
February 27	Francois Charette (UdeM) A relative Seidel morphism and applications Abstract: In this talk I will introduce 2 versions of the Seidel morphism for Lagrangian submanifolds, one of which is due to Lalonde and Hu.  As an application, I will present their computation of the Hamiltonian Lagrangian monodromy group for weakly exact Lagrangians.