Bernard Badzioch: Higher torsion invariants of smooth bundles

The classical torsion invariants of topological spaces  (e.g. the Reidemeister and Whitehead torsions) are invariants that enjoy the property that in some cases they can distinguish  between spaces that are homotopy equivalent but not homeomorphic.  The talk will describe the construction and some properties of  higher torsion invariants of smooth bundles of manifolds which can be used to detect bundles that are fiberwise homotopy equivalent (or even fiberwise homeomorphic) but not fiberwise diffeomorphic.