Activities This Week

Tropicalizations and tropical reductions provide a convenient tool to control degenerations of algebraic objects. Roughly speaking, a tropicalization is a piecewise linear object, associated to an algebraic object over a non-Archimedean field, that contains essential information about one of its integral models. The tropical reduction is then the reduction of the model over the residue field. For applications, it is often important not only to describe the tropicalization process, but also to be able to decide whether something that looks like the tropicalization and the tropical reduction comes from an algebraic object. Such statements are called lifting theorems. Tropical techniques have been applied successfully to a number of problems in algebraic geometry, such as enumerative questions, dimension estimates, descriptions of compactifications etc. In particular, in a recent work of Bainbridge, Chen, Gendron, Grushevsky, and Moeller, a tropical approach was used to describe a new compactification of the space of smooth curves with differentials (although the authors don’t use this terminology). The proofs of BCGGM rely on transcendental techniques. In my talk, I will present a modified version of BCGGM tropicalization, and will indicate an algebraic proof of the main result. The talk is based on a joint work with M.Temkin.

A circle packing is a collection of circles in the plane with disjoint interiors. An accumulation point of the circle packing is a point with infinitely many circles in any neighborhood of it. A site percolation with parameter p on the circle packing means retaining each circle with probability p and deleting it with probability 1-p, independently between circles. We will explain the proof of the following result: There exists p>0 satisfying that for any circle packing with finitely many accumulation points, after a site percolation with parameter p there is no infinite connected component of retained circles, almost surely. This implies, in particular, that the site percolation threshold of any planar recurrent graph is at least p. It is conjectured that the same should hold with p=1/2. The result gives a partial answer to a question of Benjamini, who conjectured that square packings of the unit square admit long crossings after site percolation with parameter p=1/2 and asked also about other values of p. Time permitting, we will discuss an application of the result to the existence of macroscopic loops in the loop O(n) model on the hexagonal lattice. Portions joint with Nick Crawford, Alexandar Glazman and Matan Harel.

A union closed family F is a family of sets, so that for any two sets A,B in F, A$\cup$B is also on F. Frankl conjectured in 1979 that for any union-closed family F of subsets of [n], there is some element i $\in$ [n] that appears in at least half the members of F.

The hydrogen atom system is one of the most thoroughly studied examples of a quantum mechanical system. It can be fully solved, and the main reason why is its (hidden) symmetry. In this talk I shall explain how the symmetries of the Schrödinger equation for the hydrogen atom, both visible and hidden, give rise to an example in the recently developed theory of algebraic families of Harish-Chandra modules. I will show how the algebraic structure of these symmetries completely determines the spectrum of the Schrödinger operator and sheds new light on the quantum nature of the system. No prior knowledge on quantum mechanics or representation theory will be assumed.