Connections in Geometry and Physics - 2009

This talk is a report on joint work with Mohammed Abouzaid and Ludmil Katzarkov about mirror symmetry for blowups, from the perspective of the Strominger-Yau-Zaslow conjecture. Namely, we first describe how to construct a Lagrangian torus fibration on the blowup of a toric variety X along a…

This is joint work with Francois Lalonde. Using an analogue of Seidel's homomorphism in Lagrangian Floer homology for one Lagrangian, we give a condition for a diffeomorphism on a Lagrangian to extend to a Hamiltonian diffeomorphism on the whole symplectic manifold.

In this talk we will discuss the (local) construction of a calibrated G_2 structure on the 7-dimensional quotient of an 8-dimensional quaternion-Kahler (QK) manifold M under the action of a group S^1 of isometries. The idea is to construct explicitly a 3-form of type G_2, using the data associated…

I will discuss the existence problem of extremal Kahler metrics (in the sense of Calabi) on the total space of a holomorphic projective bundle P(E) over a compact complex curve. The problem is not solved in full generality even in the case of a projective plane bundle over CP^1. However, I will show…

I'll discuss how to get an interesting invariant of submanifolds by using the ideas of string topology.

I will describe how the geometry of supersymmetric AdS solutions of type IIB string theory may be rephrased in terms of the geometry of generalized (in the sense of Hitchin) Calabi-Yau cones. Calabi-Yau cones, and hence Sasaki-Einstein manifolds, are a special case, and thus the geometrical…

"Sasakian geometry is often described as an odd dimensional counterparts of K\""ahler geometry. There is a natural Riemannian metric on the space of Sasakian metrics, which in turn gives a geodesic equation on this space. It can be viewed as parallel case of a well-known geodesic equation for the…

We produce new examples of Ricci solitons, including many of non-Kahler type, by looking for solutions with symmetries, thus reducing the equations to dynamical systems

Quite a bit of progress has been achieved over the past seven years in understanding from a rigorous mathematical perspective the long time dynamics of waves in the Kerr geometry of a rotating black hole in equilibrium. A proof of the Penrose process for scalar waves has notably been given in this…

Inspired by homological mirror symmetry, Seidel and Thomas constructed braid group actions on derived categories of coherent sheaves of various varieties and proved faithfulness of such actions for braid groups of type A. I will discuss joint work with Hugh Thomas giving some faithfulness results…

I will describe some combinatorial problems which arise when computing various types of partition functions for the Donaldson-Thomas theory of a space with a torus action. The problems are all variants of the following: give a generating function which enumerates the number of ways to pile n cubical…

"In this joint work with Jingyi Chen and Weiyong He, we prove existence of longtime smooth solutions to mean curvature flow of entire Lipschitz Lagrangian graphs. A Bernstein type result for translating solitons is also obtained."