Online: A geometric description of Reidemeister-Turaev Torsion

Zoom meeting ID: 919-9946-8404
Password: see email announcement or contact the seminar organisers:
Tobias Barthel (barthel.tobi[at]gmail.com)
David Gay (dgay[at]uga.edu)
Arunima Ray (aruray[at]mpim-bonn.mpg.de)

Reidemeister-Turaev torsion is an invariant of a 3-manifold with an Euler structure.
An Euler structure is a homotopy class of non-vanishing vector fields on the manifold.
In this talk we give a geometric description of Reidemeister-Turaev Torsion by using
the two point configuration space of the 3-manifold. In this description, an Euler structure
is understood as a framing of the diagonal of the configuration space. This description is deeply related to the Chern-Simons perturbation theory.