John Baldwin, Boston College, Contact structures, instantons, and SU(2) representations
A strengthening of the Poincare Conjecture asks whether the fundamental group of every closed 3-manifold which is not the 3-sphere admits a nontrivial homomorphism to SU(2). With that as motivation, I'll describe a connection between Stein fillings of a 3-manifold and SU(2) representations of its fundamental group, coming from instanton Floer homology. This connection can…