Apr 25

Title: Exotic four-manifolds and Floer homology

Speaker: Tye Lidman (North Carolina State University)

Abstract: A major problem in four-manifold topology is to understand the difference between the topological and smooth categories. We will use Floer homology and Dehn surgery to give some hands on constructions of exotic smooth four-manifolds. For four-manifolds with positive first Betti number, we will use a slightly different approach than the "usual" gauge-theoretic four-manifold invariants like Seiberg-Witten or Donaldson. This is joint work with Adam Levine and Lisa Piccirillo.