On the Gromov width of polygon spaces

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Alessia Mandini , University of Pavia

After Gromov’s foundational work in 1985, problems of symplectic embeddings lie in the heart of symplectic geometry. The Gromov width of a symplectic manifold (M,ω) is a symplectic invariant that measures, roughly speaking, the size of the biggest ball we can symplectically embed in (M,ω). I will discuss tecniques to compute the Gromov width of a special family of symplectic manifolds, the moduli spaces of polygons in R3 with edges of lengths (r1,,rn). Under some genericity assumptions on lengths ri, the polygon space is a symplectic manifold. After introducing this family of manifolds, I will concentrate on the spaces of 5-gons and calculate their Gromov width. This is joint work with Milena Pabiniak, IST Lisbon.