Veranstaltungsübersicht -- Wintersemester 2023/2024

Star products can be seen as a generalization of a symbol calculus for differential operators. In fact, for cotangent bundles, the global symbol calculus yields a star product of a particular kind. While formal star products have been studied in detail with deep and exciting existence and classification theorems, convergence of the formal star products is still a widely open question. Beside several (classes of) examples, not much is known. In this talk I will focus on a particular class of examples, the cotangent bundles of Lie groups, where a nice convergence scheme has been established. I will try to avoid the technical details as much as possible and focus instead on the principal ideas of the construction. The results are joint work with Micheal Heins and Oliver Roth.

Witten deformation is a versatile tool with numerous applications in mathematical physics and geometry. In this talk, we will focus on the analysis of Witten deformation for a family of non-Morse functions, leading to a new proof of the gluing formula for analytic torsions. Then we could see that the gluing formula for analytic torsion can be reformulated as the Bismut-Zhang theorem for non-Morse functions. Furthermore, this approach can be extended to analytic torsion forms, which also provides a new proof of the gluing formula for analytic torsion forms.

String topology is the study of algebraic structures on the homology of the free loop space of a closed manifold. The most famous operation is the Chas-Sullivan product which is a graded commutative and unital product on the homology of the free loop space. In this talk we study the space of paths in a manifold whose endpoints lie in a chosen submanifold. It turns out that the homology of this space also admits a product which is defined similarly to the one of Chas and Sullivan. Moreover, the homology of this path space is a module over the Chas-Sullivan ring. We will see that in some situations both structures together form an algebra - i.e. the product on homology of the path space with endpoints in a submanifold is an algebra over the Chas-Sullivan ring - but that this property does not hold in general.

Positive intermediate Ricci curvature is a family of interpolating curvature conditions between positive sectional and positive Ricci curvature. While many results that hold for positive sectional or positive Ricci curvature have been extended to these intermediate conditions, only relatively few examples are known so far. In this talk I will present several extensions of construction techniques from positive Ricci curvature to these curvature conditions, such as surgery, gluing and bundle techniques. As an application we obtain a large class of new examples of manifolds with a metric of positive intermediate Ricci curvature, including all homotopy spheres that bound a parallelisable manifold, and show that Gromov's Betti number bound for manifolds of non-negative sectional curvature does not hold from positive Ricci curvature up to roughly halfway towards positive sectional curvature. This is joint work with David Wraith.

The BV formalism and its shifted versions in field theory have a nice compatibility with boundary structures. Namely, one such structure in the bulk induces a shifted (possibly degenerated) version on its boundary, which can be interpreted as a Poisson structure (up to homotopy). I will present the results for some field theories, in particular, 4D BF theory and 4D gravity.

The prescription of eigenvalues of the Dirac operator on a closed spin manifold requires, besides the usual analytical methods à la Uhlenbeck and Dahl, also surgery methods to transport spectral data along a bordism. In this talk, I will give the necessary basics as well as an overview of the prescription of double eigenvalues on spin manifolds.

On the homology of the free loop space of a closed manifold M there exists the so-called Chas-Sullivan product. It is a product defined via the concatenation of loops and can, for example, be used to study closed geodesics of Riemannian or Finsler metrics on M. In this talk I will outline how one can use the geometry of symmetric spaces to partially compute the Chas-Sullivan product. In particular, we will see that the powers of certain non-nilpotent homology classes correspond to the iteration of closed geodesics in a symmetric metric. Some triviality results on the Goresky-Hingston cohomology product will also be mentioned. This talk is based on joint work with Maximilian Stegemeyer.

Llarull proved in the late '90s that the round $n$-sphere is area-extremal in the sense that one can not increase the scalar curvature and the metric simultaneously. Goette and Semmelmann generalized Llarull's work and proved an extremality and rigidity statement for area-non-increasing spin maps $f\colon M\to N$ of non-zero $\hat{A}$-degree between two closed connected oriented Riemannian manifolds.

In this talk, I will extend this classical result to maps between not necessarily orientable manifolds and replace the topological condition on the $\hat{A}$-degree with a less restrictive condition involving the so-called higher mapping degree. For that purpose, I will first present an index formula connecting the higher mapping degree and the Euler characteristic of~$N$ with the index of a certain Dirac operator linear over a $\mathrm{C}^\ast$-algebra. Second, I will use this index formula to show that the topological assumptions, together with our extremal geometric situation, give rise to a family of almost constant sections that can be used to deduce the extremality and rigidity statements.

We explore the framework of Generalized Seiberg-Witten Equations, aimed at deriving fresh invariants for smooth four-manifolds. These generalizations replace the standard spinor bundle with a suitable hyperKähler manifold for the spinor fields. This departure opens up exciting new possibilities for studying the smooth structures of four-dimensional manifolds, while also including a lot of well-known invariants, the most prominent example the Anti-Self-Duality equations and the resulting Donaldson invariants.

We then present how to compute the solution spaces in on of the most simple cases, where the spinor takes values in a four dimensional hyperKähler manifold, and show how this leads to invariants for four dimensional symplectic and Kähler manifolds, while also giving a geometric interpretation.