Event Type
Lectures
Tuesday, January 28, 2020 4:30 PM
Professor Cliff Taubes (Harvard University)

Abstract:  Z/2 harmonic forms are closed and coclosed 1-forms with values in a real line bundle that is defined on the complement of a cxdimension 2 subvariety of a Riemannian manifold with their norms being zero on this same subvariety. These objects are now known to appear (in dimensions 2-4) in diverse contexts involving SL(2,C) gauge theories. I hope to tell you a story about these objects and the role that they might be playing with regards to the differential topology of low dimensional manifolds.