arXiv subjects

Martin Palmer

Publications and source records attributed to Martin Palmer.

26 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2019

Advanced topics in gauge theory: mathematics and physics of Higgs bundles

These notes have been prepared as reading material for the mini-course given by the author at the "2019 Graduate Summer School" at Park City Mathematics Institute - Institute for Advanced Study. We begin by introducing Higgs bundles and their main properties (Lecture 1), and then we discuss the Hitchin fibration and its different uses (Lecture 2). The second half of the course is dedicated to studying different types of subspaces (branes) of the moduli space of complex Higgs bundles, their appearances in terms of flat connections and representations (Lecture 3), as well as correspondences between them (Lecture 4).

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arXiv2019

A comparison of twisted coefficient systems

In the first part of this note, we review and compare various instances of the notion of twisted coefficient system, a.k.a. polynomial functor, appearing in the literature. This notion hinges on how one defines the degree of a functor from $\mathcal{C}$ to an abelian category, for various different structures on $\mathcal{C}$. In the second part, we focus on twisted coefficient systems defined on partial braid categories, and explain a functorial framework for this setting.

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arXiv2017

Twisted homological stability for configuration spaces

Let M be an open, connected manifold. A classical theorem of McDuff and Segal states that the sequence of configuration spaces of n unordered, distinct points in M is homologically stable with coefficients in Z: in each degree, the integral homology is eventually independent of n. The purpose of this note is to prove that this phenomenon also holds for homology with twisted coefficients. We first define an appropriate notion of finite-degree twisted coefficient system for configuration spaces and then use a spectral sequence argument to deduce the result from the untwisted homological stability result of McDuff and Segal. The result and the methods are generalisations of those of Betley for the symmetric groups.

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arXiv2017

Triple-crossing number and moves on triple-crossing link diagrams

Every link in the 3-sphere has a projection to the plane where the only singularities are pairwise transverse triple points. The associated diagram, with height information at each triple point, is a triple-crossing diagram of the link. We give a set of diagrammatic moves on triple-crossing diagrams analogous to the Reidemeister moves on ordinary diagrams. The existence of n-crossing diagrams for every n>1 allows the definition of the n-crossing number. We prove that for any nontrivial, nonsplit link, other than the Hopf link, its triple-crossing number is strictly greater than its quintuple-crossing number.

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arXiv2015

On homological stability for configuration spaces on closed background manifolds

We introduce a new map between configuration spaces of points in a background manifold - the replication map - and prove that it is a homology isomorphism in a range with certain coefficients. This is particularly of interest when the background manifold is closed, in which case the classical stabilisation map does not exist. We then establish conditions on the manifold and on the coefficients under which homological stability holds for configuration spaces on closed manifolds. These conditions are sharp when the background manifold is a two-dimensional sphere, the classical counterexample in the field. For field coefficients this extends results of Church (2012) and Randal-Williams (2013) to the case of odd characteristic, and for $p$-local coefficients it improves results of Bendersky--Miller (2014).

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arXiv2014

Scanning for oriented configuration spaces

In [Pal13] (arXiv:1106.4540) the second author proved that the sequence of "oriented" configuration spaces on an open connected manifold exhibits homological stability as the number of particles goes to infinity. To complement that result we identify the corresponding limiting space, up to homology equivalence, as a certain explicit double cover of a section space. Along the way we also prove that the scanning map of McDuff in [McD75] for unordered configuration spaces is acyclic in the limit.

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arXiv2014

A twisted homology fibration criterion and the twisted group-completion theorem

The purpose of this note is to clarify some details in McDuff and Segal's proof of the group-completion theorem and to generalize both this and the homology fibration criterion of McDuff to homology with twisted coefficients. This will be used in forthcoming work to identify the limiting homology of "oriented" configuration spaces, which doubly cover the classical configuration spaces of distinct unordered points in a manifold.

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arXiv2011

Homological stability for oriented configuration spaces

We prove homological stability for sequences of "oriented configuration spaces" as the number of points in the configuration goes to infinity. These are spaces of configurations of n points in a connected manifold M of dimension at least 2 which 'admits a boundary', with labels in a path-connected space X, and with an orientation: an ordering of the points up to even permutations. They are double covers of the corresponding unordered configuration spaces, where the points do not have this orientation. To prove our result we adapt methods from a paper of Randal-Williams, which proves homological stability in the unordered case. Interestingly the oriented configuration spaces stabilise more slowly than the unordered ones: the stability slope we obtain is one-third, compared to one-half in the unordered case (these are the best possible slopes in their respective cases). This result can also be interpreted as homological stability for unordered configuration spaces with certain twisted coefficients.

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