News
Interested students are asked to contact one of the organizers as soon as possible to register their topic. If necessary, an organizational meeting will be held in early April.
Administration: The LSF entry for this course is 11BMASE164. It can be taken for credit in the Mathematics and Physics Bachelor and Masters programs. We will not use Müsli for registration.
Meeting time and place: Our regular meeting time is Wednesday 16h s.t.,
INF 205 SR3.
The first meeting will be on April 20.
Instructors
Dr. Richard Eager, eager@mathi.uni-heidelberg.de
Prof. J. Walcher, walcher@uni-heidelberg.de
Description
This seminar aims to trace the interactions between quantum field/string theory and geometry/topology that have taken place over the past 25 years on the backbone of supersymmetry and its cohomological features. In the Winter, we studied Witten's papers on supersymmetric quantum mechanics that started the whole story in the early 1980's. This term, we will venture into the realm of higher-(but mostly two-)dimensional quantum field theories. We will endeavour to study both their dynamics and their applications to geometry.
Prerequisites: The seminar is aimed at Masters students and advanced Bachelor students of mathematics and physics, and is accessible with a good knowledge of undergraduate quantum mechanics of finite-dimensional systems and basic notions of differential geometry. Textbook knowledge of quantum field theory is not a prerequisite, as QFT plays a somewhat different role in our story than in standard physics applications. The material from the Winter is available here, and will also be reviewed at the beginning of the semester. We welcome new participants!
Schedule of Talks
Schedule still subject to change.
| Date | Speaker | TitleAbstractNotes |
|---|---|---|
| April 20 | Richard E. | Review of Supersymmetric Quantum Mechanics |
| You may provide an abstract. | ||
| April 27 | NN | no class |
| May 4 | Sascha L. | The Coleman-Mandula Theorem |
| Thomas | 2d SUSY Introduction | |
| May 11 | Robert S. | Topological Twist of 2d field theories |
| Fabio S. | The Chiral Ring | |
| May 18 | Oskar R. | Symmetry Breaking |
| Menelaos | Kosterlitz-Thouless Transition | |
| May 25 | Moritz S. | Anomalies in QFT and Index Theory |
| Fabian K. | Atiyah-Patodi-Singer Index Theorem | |
| June 1 | Lukas H. | Sigma models into spheres |
| Ade A. | Integrability | |
| June 8 | Sebastian N. | Gromov-Witten Theory and Singularity Theory |
| Fengjun | Instantons and the \({\mathbb{CP}^n}\) \(\sigma\)-model | |
| You may provide an abstract. | ||
| June 15 | Lukas B. | Sigma model beta function |
| June 22 | Daniel S. | Solitons with fractional fermion number |
| June 29 | Ricardo W. | Quantum cohomology of \(\mathbb{CP}^n\) |
| Some other time | everything else | everything else |