Skein modules, character varieties and essential surfaces of 3-manifolds

Seminar: 
Quantum Topology and Field Theory
Event time: 
Tuesday, December 3, 2024 - 4:30pm
Location: 
KT 101
Speaker: 
Efstratia Kalfagianni
Speaker affiliation: 
Michigan State University
Event description: 
I will discuss recent progress towards  understanding how the existence of essential surfaces in a 3-manifold reflects on the structure of its Kauffman bracket skein module.
Time permitting, I will also discuss how this progress can be used to compute the dimension of these skein modules for “small” 3-manifolds.
The talk will be based on joint work with Renaud Detcherry and Adam Sikora.