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The integer valued SU(3) Casson invariant for Brieskorn spheres.

Geometry/Topology

Speaker: Chris Herald, University of Nevada, Reno
Location: 693 Kerr
Start time: Wed, Oct 30 2002, 4:10PM

In this talk I will discuss some techniques developed in joint work with Paul Kirk and Hans Boden for calculating the SU(3) Casson invariant of Brieskorn spheres. One can view this class of homology 3-spheres as surgeries on (p,q) torus knots and some similar knots in nontrivial homology spheres. The calculation methods involve resolving singularities in the flat moduli space using a "twisting perturbation" and analyzing its effect on the topology of the perturbed flat moduli space. Finally, we use Bott-Morse theory and a spectral flow splitting principle to calculate the invariant.

Dinner following talk.