4:00 pm Monday, November 16, 2009
Stulken Topology Seminar: Torsion and Open Book Decompositions
by Shea Vela-Vick (Columbia University) in HB 427
Interpreting and understanding contact geometric notions in terms of open book decompositions has been a central theme in the study of contact structures on 3–manifold ever since Giroux’s fundamental breakthrough equating contact structures on a 3–manifold with open book decompositions up to positive stabilization. Concretely, one would like to understand how natural structures arising on contact manifolds are reflected in their supporting open book decompositions. Giroux torsion is a perfect example of such a structure as it is currently the only known mechanism for a manifold to admit more than a finite number of tight contact structures. In this talk, I will shop how to use new invariants of transverse links coming from Heegaard Floer homology to begin a study the relationship between Giroux torsion and open book decompositions. Host Department: Rice University-Mathematics
Submitted by shelly@rice.edu |
