Characters of Bundles Associated to Almost Representations of Discrete Groups

Abstract: A group is said to be matricially stable if every function from the group to unitary matrices that is "almost multiplicative" in the point-operator norm topology is "close," in the same topology, to a genuine representation. A result of Dadarlat shows that even cohomology obstructs matricial stability. The obstruction in his proof can be realized as follows. To each almost-representation, we may associate a vector bundle. This vector bundle has topological invariants, called Chern characters, which lie in the even cohomology of the group. If any of these invariants are nonzero, the almost-representation is far from a genuine representation. The first Chern character can be computed with the "winding number argument" of Kazhdan, Exel, and Loring, but the other invariants are harder to compute explicitly. In this talk, I will discuss results that allow us to compute higher invariants in specific cases: when the failure to be multiplicative is scalar (joint work with Marius Dadarlat) and when the failure to be multiplicative is small in a Schatten p-norm.

geometric topologynumber theoryoperator algebrasrepresentation theory

Audience: researchers in the topic

( slides | video )

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Noncommutative geometry in NYC

Series comments: Noncommutative Geometry studies an interplay between spatial forms and algebras with non-commutative multiplication. Our seminar welcomes talks in Number Theory, Geometric Topology and Representation Theory linked to the context of Operator Algebras. All talks are kept at the entry-level accessible to the graduate students and non-experts in the field. To join us click meet.google.com/zjd-ehrs-wtx (5 min in advance) and igor DOT v DOT nikolaev AT gmail DOT com to subscribe/unsubscribe for the mailing list, to propose a talk or to suggest a speaker. Pending speaker's consent, we record and publish all talks at the hyperlink "video" on speaker's profile at the "Past talks" section. The slides can be posted by providing the organizers with a link in the format "myschool.edu/~myfolder/myslides.pdf". The duration of talks is 1 hour plus or minus 10 minutes.

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