Summer Seminar on QFT

Co-organized by Kyle Ormsby and Chris Schommer-Pries

June 14 - August 23
Tuesdays, 11:30-12:30
MIT, room 2-105
Followed by lunch

Goals

This seminar will touch on several important topics in conformal and topological quantum field theory with the aim of bringing together mathematicians of several different stripes (topologists, symplectic geometers, analysts, ...) in order to explore these subjects and promote interaction.

Tentatively, the seminar will break down into three modules,

but ultimately the participants will set the final agenda and everyone is invited to suggest topics. By breaking the seminar into modules, we hope that those with busy summer travel schedules will be able to join the seminar at any time and follow the material.

Please email if you would like to be added to the mailing list, would like to volunteer a lecture, or have a topic recommendation.

Lectures

Click the topic for an abstract.

Date Topic Speaker
June 14 Introduction, planning, and prologue Kyle Ormsby
June 21 Universal and unitary TQFTs Kyle Ormsby
June 28 Conformal field theory and loop groups Toly Preygel
July 5 Introduction to planar algebras Emily Peters
July 12 Turaev-Viro TQFTs via planar algebras [slides,pics] Chris Schommer-Pries
July 19 BV formalism and perturbative gauge theory Si Li
July 26 Seiberg-Witten theory Tim Nguyen
August 2 Morse theory on a manifold with boundary, or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the reducible monopoles Jonathan Bloom
August 9 Morse field theory Robin Koytcheff
August 16 Naturality in 2+1 dimensions Josh Batson
August 23 Perturbative Chern Simons theory and the Kontsevich integral Nick Rozenblyum

TBD = To Be Determined, TBC = To Be Coerced

Literature

At the moment, this is a brief, incomplete, and somewhat random collection of literature which may be useful during the seminar.