Sunday, May 26 2019, 9am Boyd Room 328 Title: Taut sutured handlebodies as twisted homology products Abtract: We explore a method for certifying that a sutured manifold is taut, by showing that it is homologically simple - a so-called rational homology product. Most sutured manifolds do not have this form, but do always take the more general form of a twisted homology product, which incorporates a representation of the fundamental group. The question then becomes, how complicated of a representation is needed to realize a given sutured manifold as such?
