T&G: Gangotryi Sorcar (Hebrew University), On the topology of the Teichmuller space of negatively curved Riemannian metrics

Date: 
Tue, 20/11/201814:00-15:30
Location: 
Room 209, Manchester Building, Jerusalem
This talk is a survey on results concerning the Teichmuller space of negatively curved Riemannian metrics on M. It is defined as the quotient space of the space of all negatively curved Riemannian metrics on M modulo the space of all isotopies of M that are homotopic to the identity. This space was shown to have highly non-trivial homotopy when M is real hyperbolic by Tom Farrell and Pedro Ontaneda in 2009. Then in 2015, it was shown to be non simply connected in my thesis when M is a suitably chosen Gromov-Thurston manifold (which are examples of negatively curved non-locally symmetric spaces). In 2017, Tom Farrell and myself proved a similar result for M being a suitable complex hyperbolic manifold. In all these results, the dimension of M has to be 4k − 2 for some k greater or equal to 2. In this talk, I will explain this project, and talk about the tools we have used so far in unraveling it. I will also mention the cases that are still open in this project.