Scientific

A lecture titled "Floer Homology Applications" by Jeff Hicks, University of Edinburgh. This is the 2nd in a series of 3.

General Description:
The idea of stable homotopy refinements of Floer homology was first introduced by Cohen, Jones, and Segal in a 1994 paper, but it was only in the last decade that this idea became a key tool in low-dimensional and symplectic topology. The two crowning achievements of these techniques so far are Manolescu's use of his Pin(2)-equivariant Seiberg–Witten Floer homotopy type to resolve the Triangulation Conjecture and Abouzaid-Blumberg's use of Floer homotopy theory and Morava K-theory to prove the general Arnol'd Conjecture in finite characteristic. During this period, a range of related techniques, included under the umbrella of Floer homotopy theory, have also led to important advances, including involutive Heegaard Floer homology, Smith theory for Lagrangian intersections, homotopy coherence, and further connections between string topology and Floer theory. These in turn have sparked developments in algebraic topology, ranging from developments on Lie algebras in derived algebraic geometry to new computations of equivariant Mahowald invariants to new results on topological Hochschild homology.

The goal of the summer school is to provide participants the tools in symplectic geometry and stable homotopy theory required to work on Floer homotopy theory. Students will come away with a basic understanding of some of the key techniques, questions, and challenges in both of these fields. The summer school may be particularly valuable for participants with a solid understanding of one of the two fields who want to learn more about the other and the connections between them.

The Hurwitz zeta function is a shifted integer analogue of the Riemann zeta function, for shift parameters $0<\alpha\leqslant 1$. We consider the integral moments of the Hurwitz zeta function on the critical line $\Re(s)=\frac12$. We focus on rational $\alpha$. In this case, the Hurwitz zeta function decomposes as a linear combination of Dirichlet $L$-functions, which leads us into investigating moments of products of $L$-functions. Using heuristics from random matrix theory, we conjecture an asymptotic of the same form as the moments of the Riemann zeta function. If time permits, we will discuss the case of irrational shift parameters $\alpha$, which will include some joint work with Winston Heap and Trevor Wooley and some ongoing work with Heap.

We study the moments of $L$-functions associated with primitive cusp forms, in the weight aspect. In particular, we present recent joint work with Brian Conrey, where we obtain an asymptotic formula for the twisted $r$-th moment of a long Dirichlet polynomial approximation of such $L$-functions. This result, which is conditional on the Generalized Lindel\"of Hypothesis, agrees with the prediction of the recipe by Conrey, Farmer, Keating, Rubinstein and Snaith.

We discuss some appearances of $L$-function moments in number field counting problems, with a particular focus on counting abelian extensions of number fields with restricted ramification.

How large are the $L^2$-restrictions of automorphic forms to closed geodesics? I will discuss how this problem can be shown to be equivalent to proving bounds for certain weighted moments of Hecke $L$-functions, and how the lattice structure of the ring of integers of real quadratic numbers fields can be exploited to obtain essentially optimal upper bounds for these weighted moments.