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December 01, 2023
Friday, December 01
Graduate Seminar
Time: 15:30
Speaker: Prakash Singh (Western)
Title: "The Hofer diameter problem for rational symplectic manifolds"
Room: MC 107

Abstract: In general, Lie groups do not admit bi-invariant metrics, and infinite dimensional Lie groups should not admit such metrics either. But surprisingly, Ham admits one such metric (in fact, unique in a sense), called the 'Hofer metric', discovered by Hofer in the 90s. People have been studying the large-scale geometry properties of this metric for a long time, but such studies were restricted to either 2-dimensions, monotone symplectic manifolds, or to aspherical manifolds. In particular, it is widely conjectured that the hofer diameter is infinite for every closed symplectic manifold, and this conjecture has been settled for the above-mentioned manifolds. I will talk about the diameter problem associated with this metric for some rational ruled manifolds like CP2, S2 x S2, and their blow-ups, using methods from quantum homology and spectral invariants on them. I will prove the conjecture for CP2 and S2 x S2, and I will prove it under a mild assumption (but unproven) for S2 x S2 blown up once.