Dualizability in Low-Dimensional Higher Category Theory

These lecture notes form an expanded account of a course given at the Summer School on Topology and Field Theories held at the Center for Mathematics at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana during the Summer of 2012. A similar lecture series was given in Hamburg in January 2013. The lecture notes are divided into two parts. The first part, consisting of the bulk of these notes, provides an expository account of the author's joint work with Christopher Douglas and Noah Snyder on dualizability in low-dimensional higher categories and the connection to low-dimensional topology. The cobordism hypothesis provides bridge between topology and algebra, establishing important connections between these two fields. One example of this is the prediction that the $n$-groupoid of so-called `fully-dualizable' objects in any symmetric monoidal $n$-category inherits an O(n)-action. However the proof of the cobordism hypothesis outlined by Lurie is elaborate and inductive. Many consequences of the cobordism hypothesis, such as the precise form of this O(n)-action, remain mysterious. The aim of these lectures is to explain how this O(n)-action emerges in a range of low category numbers ($n \leq 3$). The second part of these lecture notes focuses on the author's joint work with Clark Barwick on the Unicity Theorem, as presented in arXiv:1112.0040. This theorem and the accompanying machinery provide an axiomatization of the theory of $(\infty,n)$-categories and several tools for verifying these axioms. The aim of this portion of the lectures is to provide an introduction to this material.Comment: 65 pages, 8 figures. Lecture Note

Wild cyclic-by-tame extensions

Suppose G is a semi-direct product of the form Z/p^n \rtimes Z/m where p is prime and m is relatively prime to p. Suppose K is a local field of characteristic p > 0. The main result states necessary and sufficient conditions on the ramification filtrations that occur for wildly ramified G-Galois extensions of K. In addition, we prove that there exists a parameter space for G-Galois extensions of K with given ramification filtration whose dimension depends only on the ramification filtration. We provide explicit equations for wild cyclic extensions of K of degree p^3.Comment: 15 pages, section 6.2 eliminated, major simplifications in former Proposition 4.3 (now Proposition 4.2), corrections in former Proposition 4.4 (now Proposition 4.3), many small changes in notations and languag