Orateur: Christine Lescop (Grenoble)
Titre: Counting graph configurations in 3-manifolds.

Résumé: We will present ways of counting configurations of uni-trivalent Feynman graphs in 3-manifolds in order to produce invariants of these 3-manifolds and of their links, following Gauss, Witten, Bar-Natan, Kontsevich and others. We will first review the construction of the simplest invariants that can be obtained in our setting. These invariants are the linking number and the Casson invariant of integer homology 3-spheres. Next we will see how the involved ingredients allow us to define a functor on the category of framed tangles in rational homology cylinders, and we will show the properties of our functor, which generalizes both a universal Vassiliev invariant for links in the ambient space and a universal finite type invariant of rational homology 3-spheres. Finally, we will show how these constructions work in an equivariant setting in order to produce a far more structured invariant, which conjecturally lifts the previous one for null-homologous knots.