Outline of Research Interests

Bryce Chriestenson

My research focuses on the topology of stratified spaces. In particular I use

methods from algebraic topology to construct new algebraic invariants associ-
ated to certain classes of stratified spaces, including many examples arising in
theoretical physics and algebraic geometry.
Theoretical physics provides a plethora of interesting examples, often in the
form of moduli spaces. Such spaces are often smooth, non-compact manifolds. A
common way to study a non-compact manifold is to study a particular compact-
ification of it. This compactification frequently has the structure of a stratified
space, meaning that it looks mostly like the smooth non-compact manifold, but
instead of ’going of to infinity’ it instead degenerates into ’singularities.’ For
example replace an infinite cylinder with the suspension of a circle, which looks
like two hollow cones glued together along the common base circle. This has the
effect of replacing the non-compact cylinder with a compact space. The trade
off is that we get rid of non-compactness, but we instead have our space de-
generating into singularities at the cone points. The reason this is useful comes
from the fact that in the most simple cases topologically defined cohomology
theories behave the same at cone points as analytically defined cohomology the-
ories behave near infinity. This can be seen when comparing the intersection
cohomology of a point with the L2 cohomology of a conical metric at infinity.
To study a moduli space a physicists would view it as a non-compact com-
plete manifold endowed with metric that behaves nicely near infinity. One can
then produce various types of analytic invariants associated to the moduli space.
These invariants usually represent, or measure something physical, such as D-
branes, or configuration states of particles. It is often desired to know that
these analytic ’invariants’ are actually invariant under certain changes. One
of the goal of mathematicians is to describe these invariants in a topologically
invariant way, and to therefore ensure that they have the desired properties.
Many famous theorems do just this. The Hopf index theorem relates the index
of a vector field on a smooth manifold to the Euler number of the manifold.
The Atiya-Patodi-Singer index theorem relates the analytic index of an op-
erator on a certain type of manifold to a topological index associated to the
manifold. Cheeger’s Hodge theorem relates L2 -cohomology on a non-compact
manifold endowed with a particular metric to the intersection homology defined
by Goreskey and MacPherson. There are many, many more such theorem.
Much of my work thus far has focused constructing topological spaces and
cohomology theories associated to certain classes stratified spaces. In joint work
with Markus Banagl, we have given the construction of an intersection space
associated to certain types of stratified pseudomanifolds. This definition gen-
eralizes the previous definition of Banagl, and allows for a much wider class
of spaces to be analyzed. The goal of an intersection space is to produce a
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new type of cohomology theory which satisfies Poincaré duality, but has slightly
better properties than Goreskey and MacPherson’s intersection homology. The
intersection space homology HI will, for example, have an internal cup prod-
uct, while intersection homology IH does not in general have this. After we
construct this intersections space we define a duality obstruction, and prove
that the space satisfies Poincaré duality if and only if the duality obstruction
vanishes. We then use this duality to prove certain vanishing statement about
how the intersection homology signature of a Witt spaces will vanish when it
satisfies certain conditions.
With my colleague, Eugenie Hunsicker, we are trying to use some of the
ideas and constructions from my work with Markus Banagl to characterize cer-
tain L2 and weighted L2 cohomology theories topologically. These L2 -theories
arise naturally as cohomology theories associated to certain types of moduli
spaces of states in theoretical physics. Such spaces are non-compact manifold
endowed with metrics which behave in a certain way near infinity. These metrics
fall into various categories depending on their behavior: Asymptotically locally
Euclidean (ALE), and asymptotically locally flat (ALF), among others. In each
of these cases, as one approaches infinity, the space begins to looks like an open
interval crossed with the total space of a fiber bundle π : E → B. In a recent
paper Banagl and Hunsicker characterize the ALE case topologically using Ba-
nagl’s intersection spaces. However the ALF case is still not well understood
because as one approaches infinity the metric swaps the role of the base and
fiber in the fiber bundle π. This is not too much of a problem if the bundle is
trivial E ∼= F × B, but otherwise it introduces complications. Our main goal to
define a meaningful cohomology theory associated to a certain compactifications
of such an ALF space, and relate it to either the L2 -cohomology or the weighted
L2 -cohomology of the ALF metric.
A small side project that I have been working on recently is attempting to
use the change of perversity map in intersection spaces to build a topological
space which detects a type of L2 -cohomology associated to the stratified space
from which the intersection space was constructed. Much of the motivation
from this came from a careful examination of the proof of the main theorem in
the above mentioned Banagl, Hunsicker paper.
Previously in my thesis work I show how one could use the Whitney-de Rham
complex, defined by my adviser Markus Plfaum, to determine the real-homotopy
type of a semi-analytic set. I use a rectalinearization process pioneered by
Bierstone and Milman in the late 1980s. This process allowed me to reduce the
question to studying only semi-analytic sets which have singularities that are
locally a normal crossing. As such spaces are locally isomorphic to a union of
quadrants in some Euclidean space, I was able to use a smooth radial homotopy
to derive the desired result. This method significantly simplifies the proof of a
similar statement by Pflaum and Brasselet. As an application of this work we
show how the Whitney-de Rham complex can be theoretically used to compute
the cohomology of the free loop space of a semi-analytic set. Recently, Luca
Prelli has used the language of constructable sheaves to claim a similar result
for sub-analytic sets. Though the paper does not work out all of the details, Luca
has in personal communications with me, given me a satisfactory explanation
of the methods, and I believe the claim to be true.