The inverse square law is fundamental to our understanding of electromagnetism. The question of the decay of the fields associated to nonabelian gauge theories is more difficult because the equations determining these fields are nonlinear. In this talk, I will discuss recent progress in establishing decay rates for instantons.

To a cobordism between links, Khovanov homology assigns a linear map that is invariant under boundary-preserving isotopy of the cobordism. In this talk, we study those maps arising from surfaces in the 4-ball and apply our findings to existence and uniqueness questions regarding slice disks bounding a given knot. This reflects joint works with Jonah Swann and Kyle Hayden.

Based on the work of Gross and Sheng-Zuo, Friedman and Laza have classified variations of real Hodge structure of Calabi-Yau type over Hermitian symmetric domains. In particular, over every irreducible Hermitian symmetric domain there exists a canonical variation of real Hodge structure of Calabi-Yau type. In this talk, we wil review Friedman and LazaÂ?s classification. A natural question to ask is whether the canonical Hermitian variations of Hodge structure of Calabi-Yau type come from families of Calabi-Yau manifolds (geometric realization). In general, this is very difficult and is still open for small dimensional domains. We will discuss an intermediate question, namely does the canonical variations occur in algebraic geometry as sub-variations of Hodge structure of those coming from families of algebraic varieties (motivic realization). In particular, we will give motivic realizations for the canonical variations of Calabi-Yau type over irreducible tube domains of type A using abelian varieties of Weil type.

In this talk we consider the moduli space of Yang-Mills instantons on the family of hyperkahler 4 manifolds known as multi-center TaubNUT spaces. We describe the Nahm transform for flat manifolds. Then we sketch its extension to the above hyperkahler family, where it defines an isometry between the moduli space of instantons on the multi-center TaubNUT and the moduli space of solutions of a rococo system of ordinary differential equations. This is joint work with Sergey Cherkis and Andres Larrain Hubach

The Monopole (Bogomolnyi) equations are Geometric PDEs in 3 dimensions. In this talk I shall introduce a generalization of the monopole equations to both Calabi Yau and G_2 manifolds. I will motivate the possible relations of conjectural enumerative theories arising from "counting" monopoles and calibrated cycles of codimension 3. Then, I plan to state the existence of solutions and sketch how these examples are constructed.

In this talk, we will study strongly negative amphicheiral knots - a class of knots with symmetry. These knots provide torsion elements in the knot concordance group, which are less understood than infinite-order elements. We will introduce the half-Alexander polynomial, an equivariant version of the Alexander polynomial for strongly negative amphicheiral knots, focusing on its applications to knot concordance. In particular, I will show how it facilitated the construction of the first examples of non-slice amphicheiral knots of determinant one. This talk is based on joint work with Keegan Boyle.

We discuss the following recent result of the speaker. Suppose a closed 3-manifold M has scalar curvature at least 1, and has nontrivial second homotopy group, and is not covered by the cylinder (S^2)*R. Then the pi_2-systole of M (i.e. the minimal area in the second homotopy group) is bounded by a constant that is approximately 5.44pi. If we include quotients of cylinder into consideration, then the best upper bound is weakened to 8_pi. This shows a topological gap in the pi_2-systolic inequality. We will discuss the ideas behind this theorem, as well as the proof using Huisken and Ilmanenâ??s weak inverse mean curvature flow.

Among the first significant results of algebraic topology is the computation, by Thom, Milnor, Novikov, and Wall among others, of the bordism groups of stably complex and oriented manifolds. After reviewing these results, I will discuss the notion of derived orbifolds, and briefly indicate how the bordism groups of these objects appear as universal recipients of invariants arising in Gromov-Witten theory and symplectic topology. Finally, I will state what is known about them, as well as some conjectures about the structure of these groups.