Urbana Campus Research Calendar (OVCRI)

Cobordism categories describe the algebraic gluing structure of manifolds, and they are central in the functorial description of topological quantum field theories (TQFTs). We consider a new “nested” variation of a cobordism category where manifolds come with embedded submanifolds and cobordisms with sub-cobordisms. An example is the category of cylinders with lines. In this talk, I will describe the algebraic structure associated with this striped cylinder cobordism category. This is joint work with Calle, Hoekzema, Murray, Pacheco-Tallaj,  and Sridhar-Shapiro.