Geometry and Physics Seminar: Ping Xu

In 1997, Rozansky and Witten built new finite-type invariants of 3-manifolds from hyperkahler manifolds. It was later shown by Kontsevich and Kapranov that those invariants only depend on the holomorphic symplectic structure of the hyperkahler manifolds. Indeed Kapranov proved that these invariants may be considered as an analogue of Chern-Simons type invariants, where the Atiyah class of the underlying complex manifold plays the role of Lie bracket. In this talk, we introduce symplectic structures on "Lie pairs" of (real or complex) algebroids, encompassing homogeneous symplectic spaces, symplectic manifolds with a $\mathfrak g$-action and holomorphic symplectic manifolds. We show that to each such symplectic Lie pair are associated Rozansky-Witten-type invariants of three-manifolds. This is a joint work with Yannick Voglaire.