Colóquio 

31/05/2012, 16:30 — 17:30 — Sala P3.10, Pavilhão de Matemática
Richard Wentworth, University of Maryland

Topology of representation varieties of surface groups

This will be a survey talk on some aspects of the geometry and topology of moduli spaces of representations of surface groups into Lie groups. I will discuss recent generalizations of the techniques of Atiyah and Bott on equivariant Morse theory. These extend results on stable bundles to Higgs bundles and associated moduli spaces, which correspond to representation varieties into noncompact Lie groups.