EVENT DETAILS AND ABSTRACT

Title: Higher G-torsion, polylogarithms and Mackey functors
Speaker: Kiyoshi Igusa
Speaker Info: Brandeis University
Brief Description:
Special Note:
Abstract:

This is a report on joint work with Tom Goodwillie based on earlier joint work with Goodwillie and Ohrt. In this project we generalize a very elegant topological construction of Allen Hatcher to explicitly construct exotic smooth structures on smooth manifold bundles and compute their higher Franz-Reidemeister torsion invariants to verify that they are nonstandard.

The talk will review the history, then give a brief description of the new construction, the use of Mackey functors to organize the higher torsion invariants and the properties of polylogarithms of roots of unity which imply the linear independence of the exotic equivariant bundles.