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Deformation Theory Seminar

Wednesday, June 6, 2007 - 2:00pm

Tony Giaquinto

U Loyola-Cichago

Location

University of Pennsylvania

DRL 4N30

The notion of a twisted Poisson structure on manifolds or, more generally, a Lie algebroid has appeared in various places in the mathematical physics literature recently. Loosely speaking, a twisted Poisson structure is a controlled failure of the Jacobi identity for a skew symmetric bracket. I will discuss the basic definition and give some examples of twisted Poisson structures in the most elementary case: a Lie algebroid over a point, i.e. a single Lie algebra. Some loose (at the moment) connections to boundary solutions of classical (untwisted) triangular r-matrices will be discussed. In particular, I will present a sharpened form of and provide computational evidence for a conjecture of Gerstenhaber and Giaquinto regarding generalized Cremmer-Gervais quasi-triangular r-matrices and Frobenius parabolic subalgebras of sl(n).