Berlin-Hamburg-Seminar am 17.6.2019

Jo Nelson (Rice) Equivariant and nonequivariant contact homology

I will discuss joint work with Hutchings which constructs nonequivariant and a family floer equivariant version of contact homology. Both theories are generated by two copies of each Reeb orbit over Z and capture interesting torsion information. I will then explain how one can recover the original cylindrical theory proposed by Eliashberg-Givental-Hofer via our construction.

Alex Oancea (Paris) Rabinowitz-Floer homology for cotangent bundles

I will explain the structure of Rabinowitz-Floer homology for cotangent bundles and its relation to string topology.
Rabinowitz-Floer homology satisfies Poincaré duality, and I will adopt this point of view in order to explain a certain number of symmetries between homological and cohomological properties of free loop spaces. Joint work with Kai Cieliebak and Nancy Hingston.