EVENT DETAILS AND ABSTRACT

Title: On characteristic classes in symplectic topology
Speaker: Sam Nariman
Speaker Info: Northwestern University
Brief Description:
Special Note:
Abstract:

Kotschick and Morita used the flux homomorphism to construct characteristic classes of surface bundles whose holonomy groups preserve the symplectic structure of the fiber. They used geometric arguments to prove that these classes are non-trivial in the stable range. In this talk, I give a homotopy theoretic description of these classes. In particular, I construct infinite loop spaces whose homology groups are the same as the stable group homology of symplectomorphisms and extended Hamiltonians of surfaces.