Differential geometry seminar

A couple of years ago, Ammann, Kröncke and Müller proposed a construction producing initial data sets for spacetimes with lightlike parallel spinor as studied by Baum, Leistner and Lischewski in the context of Lorentzian special holonomy. The input data for the AKM-construction essentially consists of a curve in the moduli space of Ricci-flat metrics on a closed manifold Q together with a parallel spinor for a metric representing its starting point. It remained unclear, however, to which extent all initial data for spacetimes with lightlike parallel spinor can be obtained by this construction for a fixed codimension 2 topology Q. In this talk, based on joint work with Bernd Ammann and Klaus Kröncke, we seek to improve the construction. It turns out that there is mainly only one additional freedom: to prescribe a single geometrically meaningful scalar function.

In this talk, I will present the meeting of different dynamical systems: tiling billiards, the wind-tree model and the Eaton lenses. The three of them are motivated by physics.
In the beginning of the 2000’s, physicists have conceived metamaterials with negative index of refraction. Tilling billiards’ trajectories consist of light rays moving in an arrangement of metamaterials with opposite index of refraction. The wind-tree model was introduced by Paul and Tatyana Ehrenfest to study a gaz: a particle is moving in a plane where obstacles are periodically placed, on which the particle bounces. The Eaton lenses are a periodic array of lenses in the plane, in which we consider a light ray that is reflected each time it crosses a lens.
After having introduced these dynamical systems, I will consider a mix of them: an arrangement of rectangles in the plane, like in the wind-tree model, but made of metamaterials, like for tiling billiards. I study the trajectories of light in this plane. They are refracted each time they cross a rectangle.
Using dynamics on half-translation surfaces and their moduli space, I show that these trajectories are trapped in a strip, for almost every parameter. This behavior is similar to the one of the Eaton lenses.

Geometric methods in computational complexity

Présentation et unicité de groupes de Kac-Moody sur les anneaux locaux

A chaque matrice de Cartan généralisée (GCM) $A$ et chaque anneau $R$, Jacques Tits a associé un groupe de Kac-Moody $G_A(R)$ défini par une présentation à la Steinberg généralisant celle des groupes de Chevalley. Dans ce travail en collaboration avec Bernhard Mühlherr, nous avons exploré la question suivante : pour un domaine $R$ de corps de fractions $K$, l’application canonique $\phi_R : G_A(R)\to G_A(K)$ est-elle injective ? Cette question a une longue histoire dans le cas classique où $A$ est une matrice de Cartan ; notre résultat principal est que l’application $\phi_R$ est injective dès que $A$ est une GCM $2$-sphérique et $R$ est un anneau de valuation.

Dans la première partie de l’exposé, j’énoncerai précisément ce théorème, et en présenterai le contexte et introduirai les notions nécessaires à sa compréhension. Dans la deuxième partie de l’exposé, j’expliquerai l’idée de base de la preuve et la raison des hypothèses faites sur $A$ et $R$. L’objectif est que les deux parties soient accessibles pour un public non-spécialiste.

La géométrie de ces surfaces est conditionnée par une équation de Liouville avec des données au bord de type Dirichlet-Neumann. La géométrie différentielle permet de séparer les variables et de construire des exemples en utilisant les systèmes intégrables. Pour aller plus loin, en combinant des aspects algébriques et analytiques, j’expliquerai comment obtenir des estimées d’énergie pour ces surfaces à bord.

Une structure de produit conforme sur une variété riemannienne $(M,g)$ est une connexion de Weyl (c’est-à-dire une connexion sans torsion qui préserve la classe conforme de la métrique $g$) à holonomie réductible. Nous classifions ces structures dans le cas où $M$ est compacte et $g$ est compatible avec une structure kählerienne. C’est un travail en collaboration avec Mihaela Pilca (Regensburg).

An important family of solutions to the Einstein vacuum equations is given by the Kerr metrics, which describe rotating black holes. In this talk, I will present some important geometric properties of these spacetimes relevant to the study of classical field equations such as the scalar waves, electromagnetism and linearized gravity. As observed by Teukolsky, by exploiting a special algebraic property of the spacetime, it is possible to decouple certain components of the fields from the rest of the system, leading to the so-called Teukolsky equation. Solutions of this equation can then be analyzed to recover information about the full system.

IPVTs and applications

I will discuss limits in low intensity of Poisson-Voronoi tessellations, which we called ideal Poisson-Voronoi tessellations (IPVTs).

In the colloquium part, I will focus on the IPVT of real hyperbolic space of dimension d, where a simple Poissonian description of the cell containing the origin enables an in-depth study of the geometric features of its tiles.

In the research seminar part, I will discuss sufficient conditions for convergence toward IPVTs in a general metric space, and illustrate them for the Cartesian product of two hyperbolic planes endowed with the $L^1$ metric. Then I will discuss an application to proving the smallness of the uniqueness threshold of Poisson/Bernoulli–Voronoi percolation on spaces with a non-amenable product structure.

Based on joint works with Nicolas Curien, Nathanaël Enriquez, Russell Lyons, Meltem Ünel (2303.16831, to appear on The Annals of Probability), on 2412.00822, and on incoming works with Ali Khezeli and with Jan Grebik, Ali Khezeli, Konstantin Recke, and Amanda Wilkens.

The Hawking energy is one of the simplest quasi-local energy definitions in general relativity. Despite its simplicity, the Hawking energy has faced challenges due to ambiguities when applied to general surfaces. In this talk, I will present recent results demonstrating that the Hawking energy exhibits key physical and mathematical properties—non-negativity, rigidity,
and monotonicity—when evaluated on a generalization of  area-constrained Willmore surfaces  (Hawking surfaces). In particular such properties hold for area-constrained Willmore surfaces on manifolds with nonnegative scalar curvature.  These results establish Hawking surfaces as a useful tool for evaluating the Hawking energy and reinforce its potential as a meaningful tool for understanding gravitational phenomena.

The symmetrized Asymptotic Mean Value Laplacian \tilde{\Delta}, is obtained as limit of approximating integral operators \tilde{\Delta}_r, and is an extension of the classical Euclidean Laplace operator to the realm of metric measure spaces. We show that in the limit as r->0, as the operators eventually admit isolated eigenvalues defined via min-max procedure  on any compact uniformly locally doubling metric measure space. Then we prove L^2 and spectral convergence of \tilde{\Delta}_r to the Laplace-Beltrami operator of a compact Riemannian manifold, imposing Neumann conditions when the manifold has a non-empty boundary.