Topology Seminar - "Massey Products and Monent-Angle Complexes", Abigail Linton (Southampton) Seminar

Event details

Massey products are higher cohomology operations that are important across algebra, topology and geometry, but are notoriously extremely difficult to compute. As a result, there are relatively few explicit examples of non-formal manifolds, that is, of manifolds with a non-trivial Massey product in their cohomology. In this talk, I present methods to create non-formal manifolds through the moment-angle complex construction. Moment-angle complexes have a natural underlying combinatorial structure that allows us to study obstructions to Massey products in cohomology. In particular, we will see how certain operations on simplicial complexes, such as stellar subdivisions and edge contractions, can be used to create moment-angle complexes with non-trivial n-Massey products on classes of any given degree.