Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

An $A$-path is a path whose intersection with a vertex set $A$ is exactly its endpoints. We show that, for all primes $p$, the family of $A$-paths of length $0 \,\mathrm{mod}\, p$ satisfies an approximate packing-covering duality known as the Erdős-Pósa property. This answers a recent question of Bruhn and Ulmer. We also show that, if $m$ is an odd prime power, then for all integers $L$, the family of cycles of length $L \,\mathrm{mod}\, m$ satisfies the Erdős-Pósa property. This partially answers a question of Dejter and Neumann-Lara from 1987 on characterizing all such integer pairs $L$ and $m$. Both results are consequences of a structure theorem which refines the Flat Wall Theorem of Robertson and Seymour to undirected group-labelled graphs analogously to a result of Huynh, Joos, and Wollan in the directed setting. Joint work with Robin Thomas.

The 2011 PhD thesis of Farris demonstrated that the ECH of a prequantization bundle over a Riemann surface is isomorphic as a Z/2Z-graded group to the exterior algebra of the homology of its base, the only known computation of ECH to date which does not rely on toric methods. We extend this result by computing the Z-grading on the chain complex, permitting a finer understanding of this isomorphism. We fill in some technical details, including the Morse-Bott direct limit argument and some writhe bounds. The former requires the isomorphism between filtered Seiberg-Witten Floer cohomology and filtered ECH as established by Hutchings--Taubes. The latter requires the work on higher asymptotics of pseudoholomorphic curves by Cristofaro-Gardiner--Hutchings—Zhang.

The Swendsen-Wang dynamics is a popular algorithm for sampling from the Gibbs distribution for the ferromagnetic Ising and Potts models. The dynamics is a global Markov chain that is conjectured to converge quickly to equilibrium even at low temperatures, where the correlations in the system are strong and local chains converge slowly. In this talk, we present new results concerning the speed of convergence of the Swendsen-Wang dynamics under spatial mixing (i.e., decay of correlations) conditions. In particular, we provide tight results for three distinct geometries: the integer d-dimensional integer lattice graph Z^d, regular trees, and random d-regular graphs. Our approaches crucially exploit the underlying geometry in different ways in each case.