Indicators of Tambara-Yamagami categories and Gauss sums

We prove that the higher Frobenius-Schur indicators, introduced by Ng and Schauenburg, give a strong enough invariant to distinguish between any two Tambara-Yamagami fusion categories. Our proofs are based on computation of the higher indicators as quadratic Gauss sums for certain quadratic forms on finite abelian groups and relies on the classification of quadratic forms on finite abelian groups, due to Wall. As a corollary to our work, we show that the state-sum invariants of a Tambara-Yamagami category determine the category as long as we restrict to Tambara-Yamagami categories coming from groups G whose order is not a power of 2. Turaev and Vainerman proved this result under the assumption that G has odd order and they conjectured that a similar result should hold for groups of even order. We also give an example to show that the assumption that G does not have a power of 2, cannot be completely relaxed.Comment: 29 page

Geometric and homological finiteness in free abelian covers

We describe some of the connections between the Bieri-Neumann-Strebel-Renz invariants, the Dwyer-Fried invariants, and the cohomology support loci of a space X. Under suitable hypotheses, the geometric and homological finiteness properties of regular, free abelian covers of X can be expressed in terms of the resonance varieties, extracted from the cohomology ring of X. In general, though, translated components in the characteristic varieties affect the answer. We illustrate this theory in the setting of toric complexes, as well as smooth, complex projective and quasi-projective varieties, with special emphasis on configuration spaces of Riemann surfaces and complements of hyperplane arrangements.Comment: 30 pages; to appear in Configuration Spaces: Geometry, Combinatorics and Topology (Centro De Giorgi, 2010), Edizioni della Normale, Pisa, 201

The computation of the cohomology rings of all groups of order 128

We describe the computation of the mod-2 cohomology rings of all 2328 groups of order 128. One consequence is that all groups of order less than 256 satisfy the strong form of Benson's Regularity Conjecture.Comment: 15 pages; revised versio

On the Cohomology of Central Frattini Extensions

We use topological methods to compute the mod p cohomology of certain p-groups. More precisely we look at central Frattini extensions of elementary abelian by elementary abelian groups such that their defining k-invariants span the entire image of the Bockstein. We show that if p is sufficiently large, then the mod p cohomology of the extension can be explicitly computed as an algebra