Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

In this talk I will introduce a Tb Theorem that characterizes all Calderón-Zygmund operators that extend compactly on L^p(R^n) by means of testing functions as general as possible. In the classical theory for boundedness, the testing functions satisfy a non-degeneracy property called accretivity, which essentially implies the existence of a positive lower bound for the absolute value of the averages of the testing functions over all dyadic cubes. However, in the setting of compact operators, due to their better properties, the hypothesis of accretivity can be relaxed to a large extend. As a by-product, the results also describe those Calderón-Zygmund operators whose boundedness can be checked with non-accretive testing functions.

Almost all biological activities involve transport and distribution of ions and charged particles. The complicated coupling and competition between different ionic solutions in various biological environments give the intricate specificity and selectivity in these systems. In this talk, I will introduce several extended general diffusion systems motivated by the study of ion channels and ionic solutions in biological cells. In particular, I will focus on the interactions between different species, the boundary effects and in many cases, the thermal effects.

Existence of ballistic transport for Schr ̈odinger operator with a quasi- periodic potential in dimension two is discussed. Considerations are based on the following properties of the operator: the spectrum of the operator contains a semiaxis of absolutely continuous spectrum and there are generalized eigenfunctions being close to plane waves ei⟨⃗k,⃗x⟩ (as |⃗k| → ∞) at every point of this semiaxis. The isoenergetic curves in the space of momenta ⃗k corresponding to these eigenfunctions have a form of slightly distorted circles with holes (Cantor type structure).

Peter Lambert-Cole: Mutant knots are notoriously hard to distinguish. Many, but not all, knot invariants take the same value on mutant pairs. Khovanov homology with coefficients in Z/2Z is known to be mutation-invariant, while the bigraded knot Floer homology groups can distinguish mutants such as the famous Kinoshita-Terasaka and Conway pair. However, Baldwin and Levine conjectured that delta-graded knot Floer homology, a singly-graded reduction of the full invariant, is preserved by mutation. In this talk, I will give a new proof that Khovanov homology mod 2 is mutation-invariant. The same strategy can be applied to delta-graded knot Floer homology and proves the Baldwin-Levine conjecture for mutations on a large class of tangles. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Alex Zupan: Generally speaking, given a type of manifold decomposition, a natural problem is to determine the structure of all decompositions for a fixed manifold. In particular, it is interesting to understand the space of decompositions for the simplest objects. For example, Waldhausen's Theorem asserts that up to isotopy, the 3-sphere has a unique Heegaard splitting in every genus, and Otal proved an analogous result for classical bridge splittings of the unknot. In both cases, we say that these decompositions are "standard," since they can be viewed as generic modifications of a minimal splitting. In this talk, we examine a similar question in dimension four, proving that -- unlike the situation in dimension three -- the unknotted 2-sphere in the 4-sphere admits a non-standard bridge trisection. This is joint work with Jeffrey Meier.