Title: Obstruction to Riemannian smoothings of a locally CAT(0) manifold
Speaker: Bakul Sathaye (Ohio State University)
Abstract: In this talk I will discuss obstructions to Riemannian smoothings of a locally CAT(0) manifold. I will focus on obstructions in dimension = 4 given by Davis-Januszkiewicz-Lafont and show how their methods can be extended to construct more examples of locally CAT(0) 4-manifolds $M$ that do not support Riemannian metric with nonpositive section curvature. Further, the universal cover of such a manifold, $\tilde M$, satisfies the isolated flats condition and contains a collection of 2-dimensional flats with the property that their boundaries at infinity form non-trivial link in $\partial^\infty \tilde M$.
Seminar URL: https://research.math.osu.edu/topology/
