**CANCELED** Knots with all prime power branched covers bounding rational homology balls

GAUGE-TOPOLOGY-SYMPLECTIC

Speaker:

Allison Miller - Rice University

Given a slice knot K and a prime power n, the n-th cyclic branched cover \Sigma_n(K) bounds a rational homology ball (Casson-Gordon). Even if one restricts to n=2, this gives a powerful sliceness obstruction, which for example sufficed determine the smoothly slice 2-bridge (Lisca) and odd 3-strand pretzel knots (Greene-Jabuka). It is natural to ask whether the property that all prime power cyclic branched covers bound rational homology ball characterizes slice knots. In this talk I will discuss recent joint work with P. Aceto, J. Meier, M. Miller, J. Park, and A. Stipsicz proving it does not.

Future schedule is found here: https://scholar.harvard.edu/gerig/seminar