Marianty Ionel, McMaster University, September 16, 2002

Title: Special Lagrangian Submanifolds in C^m

Abstract:

Special lagrangian geometry received reinforced attention in 1996 because of the SYZ conjecture. This conjecture reveals the role of the special lagrangian geometry in Mirror Symmetry, a mysterious relationship between pairs of Calabi-Yau 3-folds, coming from String Theory. In this context, a lot of research is going on to find as many examples of special lagrangian submanifolds as possible, in order to understand what kind of singularities they can develop, classify them and ultimately resolve the SYZ conjecture. Because singularities of SL m-folds in Calabi-Yau are locally modeled on singularities of SL m-folds in C^m, the first step would be to understand and classify SL in C^m. In dimension m=2, the classification is done and a lot of examples are known in higher dimensions by now, but a complete classification is not yet known, even for dimension m=3. This talk will introduce the notion of a special lagrangian submanifold in a Calabi-Yau manifold, some basic properties and some known examples in the flat case C^m, with an accent to the dimension m=3, of interest to physicists.