arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Paul Seidel.
These are (heavily revised) notes from lectures given at the AMS Algebraic Geometry meeting in Seattle, 2005. The main topic is symplectic homology seen from the point of view of Lefschetz fibrations. Most of the content is speculative, but some supporting evidence is included.
Current interferometric gravitational wave detectors (IGWDs) are operated at room temperature with test masses made from fused silica. Fused silica shows very low absorption at the laser wavelength of 1064 nm. It is also well suited to realize low thermal noise floors in the detector signal band since it offers low mechanical loss, i. e. high quality factors (Q factors) at room temperature. However, for a further reduction of thermal noise, cooling the test masses to cryogenic temperatures may prove an interesting technique. Here we compare the results of Q factor measurements at cryogenic temperatures of acoustic eigenmodes of test masses from fused silica and its crystalline counterpart. Our results show that the mechanical loss of fused silica increases with lower temperature and reaches a maximum at 30 K for frequencies of slightly above 10 kHz. The losses of crystalline quartz generally show lower values and even fall below the room temperature values of fused silica below 10 K. Our results show that in comparison to fused silica, crystalline quartz has a considerably narrower and lower dissipation peak on cooling and thus has more promise as a test mass material for IGDWs operated at cryogenic temperatures. The origin of the different Q factor versus temperature behavior of the two materials is discussed.
We describe various approaches to understanding Fukaya categories of cotangent bundles. All of the approaches rely on introducing a suitable class of noncompact Lagrangian submanifolds. We review the work of Nadler-Zaslow (math/0604379, math/0612399) and the authors (math/0701783), before discussing a new approach using family Floer cohomology and the ``wrapped Fukaya category''. The latter, inspired by Viterbo's symplectic homology, emphasises the connection to loop spaces, hence seems particularly suitable when trying to extend the existing theory beyond the simply-connected case.
We consider exact Lagrangian submanifolds in cotangent bundles. Under certain additional restrictions (triviality of the fundamental group of the cotangent bundle, and of the Maslov class and second Stiefel-Whitney class of the Lagrangian submanifold) we prove such submanifolds are Floer-cohomologically indistinguishable from the zero-section. This implies strong restrictions on their topology. An essentially equivalent result was recently proved independently by Nadler, using a different approach.
Mechanical losses of crystalline silicon and calcium fluoride have been analyzed in the temperature range from 5 to 300 K by our novel mechanical spectroscopy method, cryogenic resonant acoustic spectroscopy of bulk materials (CRA spectrocopy). The focus lies on the interpretation of the measured data according to phonon-phonon interactions and defect induced losses in consideration of the excited mode shape.
Fundamental mechanical loss mechanisms exist even in very pure materials, for instance, due to the interactions of excited acoustic waves with thermal phonons. A reduction of these losses in a certain frequency range is desired in high precision instruments like gravitational wave detectors. Systematic analyses of the mechanical losses in those low loss materials are essential for this aim, performed in a highly sensitive experimental set-up. Our novel method of mechanical spectroscopy, cryogenic resonant acoustic spectroscopy of bulk materials (CRA spectroscopy), is well suited to systematically determine losses at the resonant frequencies of the samples of less than 10^(-9) in the wide temperature range from 5 to 300 K. A high precision set-up in a specially built cryostat allows contactless excitation and readout of the oscillations of the sample. The experimental set-up and measuring procedure are described. Limitations to our experiment due to external loss mechanisms are analysed. The influence of the suspension system as well as the sample preparation is explained.
These are notes from the 2003 C.I.M.E. summer school "symplectic 4-manifolds and algebraic surfaces". They cover the same material as the author's (by now ancient) Ph.D. thesis.
Using the symplectic geometry of certain manifolds which appear naturally in Lie theory, we define an invariant which assigns a graded abelian group to an oriented link. The relevant manifolds are transverse slices to certain nilpotent orbits inside sl_{2m}, and intersections of those with regular semisimple orbits. The invariant is conjectured to be equal to Khovanov's combinatorially defined homology theory (with the bigrading of that theory collapsed in a certain way).
Ramanujam's surface M is a contractible affine algebraic surface which is not homeomorphic to the affine plane. For any m>1 the product M^m is diffeomorphic to Euclidean space R^{4m}. We show that, for every m>0, M^m cannot be symplectically embedded into a subcritical Stein manifold. This gives the first examples of exotic symplectic structures on Euclidean space which are convex at infinity. It follows that any exhausting plurisubharmonic Morse function on M^m has at least three critical points, answering a question of Eliashberg. The heart of the argument involves showing a particular Lagrangian torus L inside M cannot be displaced from itself by any Hamiltonian isotopy, via a careful study of pseudoholomorphic discs with boundary on L.
This short and fairly informal note is an attempt to explain how methods of homological algebra may be brought to bear on problems in symplectic geometry. We do this by looking at a familiar sample question, which is that of the topology of Lagrangian submanifolds in the cotangent bundle of the sphere.
We investigate the effect of external stresses on structural and mechanical properties of a strained damaged thin layer by developing a continuum phase-field mesoscale model based on the introduction of an order parameter field, the defect concentration, coupled with a displacement field. We find that even in the case of an initially uniform distribution of point defects external stresses drive the nucleation of local regions with higher concentration of vacancies or self-interstitials than their average value over the film. The effect can explain our experimental findings relating generation of highly heterogeneous regions in cobalt disilicide film fabricated in self-aligned processing on a silicon surface as well as improvement of fracture toughness in a tetragonal zirconia ceramics with oxygen vacancies.
The long exact sequence describes how the Floer cohomology of two Lagrangian submanifolds changes if one of them is modified by applying a Dehn twist. We give a proof in the simplest case (no bubbling). The paper contains a certain amount of material that may be of interest independently of the exact sequence: in particular, chapter 1 covers "symplectic Picard-Lefschetz theory" in some detail, and chapter 2 contains a generalization of the usual TQFT setup for Floer cohomology.
This is an informal (and mostly conjectural) discussion of some aspects of Fukaya categories. We start by looking at exact symplectic manifolds which are obtained from a closed Calabi-Yau by removing a hyperplane section. We look at the possible geometric significance of Hochschild cohomology in this situation, and how one can try to get from the Fukaya category of the exact manifold to that of the closed Calabi-Yau. Also included is a brief discussion of the role of Lefschetz pencils, and a bit of general deformation theory. To appear in the Proceedings of the Beijing ICM.
We explain how a version of Floer homology can be used as an invariant of symplectic manifolds with $b_1>0$. As a concrete example, we look at four-manifolds produced from braids by a surgery construction. The outcome shows that the invariant is nontrivial; however, it is an open question whether it is stronger than the known ones.
We consider the derived categories of modules over a certain family A_m of graded rings, and Floer cohomology of Lagrangian intersections in the symplectic manifolds which are the Milnor fibres of simple singularities of type A_m. We show that each of these two rather different objects encodes the topology of curves on an (m+1)-punctured disc. We prove that the braid group B_{m+1} acts faithfully on the derived category of A_m-modules and that it injects into the symplectic mapping class group of Milnor fibers. The philosophy behind our results is as follows. Using Floer cohomology, one should be able to associate to the Milnor fibre a triangulated category (its construction has not been carried out in detail). This triangulated category should contain a full subcategory which is equivalent, up to a slight difference in the grading, to the derived category of A_m-modules. The full embedding would connect the two occurrences of the braid group, thus explaining the similarity between them.
We consider symplectic Floer homology in the lowest nontrivial dimension, that is to say, for area-preserving diffeomorphisms of surfaces. Particular attention is paid to the quantum cap product; we show that it distinguishes the trivial element of the mapping class group from any nontrivial one.
The paper continues the discussion of symplectic aspects of Picard-Lefschetz theory begun in "Vanishing cycles and mutation" (this archive). There we explained how to associate to a suitable fibration over a two-dimensional disc a triangulated category, the "derived directed Fukaya category" which describes the structure of the vanishing cycles. The present second part serves two purposes. Firstly, it contains various kinds of algebro-geometric examples, including the "mirror manifold" of the projective plane. Secondly there is a (largely conjectural) discussion of more advanced topics, such as (i) Hochschild cohomology, (ii) relations between Picard-Lefschetz theory and Morse theory, (iii) a proposed "dimensional reduction" algorithm for doing certain Floer cohomology computations.
This is the writeup of a talk given at the European Congress of Mathematics, Barcelona. It considers Picard-Lefschetz theory from the Floer cohomology viewpoint.