Colloquium Series Seminar

The first part of the talk will review background material on the differential geometry of 7-dimensional manifolds with the exceptional holonomy group $G_{2}$. There are now many thousands of examples of deformation classes of such manifolds and there are good reasons for thinking that many of these have fibrations with general fibre diffeomorphic to a K3 surface and some singular fibres: higher dimensional analogues of Lefschetz fibrations in algebraic geometry. In the second part of the talk we will discuss some questions which arise in the analysis of these fibrations and their "adiabatic limits". The key difficulties involve the singular fibres. This brings up a PDE problem, analogous to a free boundary problem, and similar problems have arisen in a number of areas of differential geometry over the past few years, such as in Taubes' work on gauge theory. We will outline some techniques for handling these questions.



Zoom Link: https://umich.zoom.us/j/95554420187

Passcode: 079634 Speaker(s): Simon Donaldson (Imperial College London)