Chern-Simons Gauge Theory: 20 Years After PDF Download

Author: Jørgen E. Andersen
Publisher: American Mathematical Soc.
ISBN: 0821853538
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
In 1989, Edward Witten discovered a deep relationship between quantum field theory and knot theory, and this beautiful discovery created a new field of research called Chern-Simons theory. This field has the remarkable feature of intertwining a large number of diverse branches of research in mathematics and physics, among them low-dimensional topology, differential geometry, quantum algebra, functional and stochastic analysis, quantum gravity, and string theory. The 20-year anniversary of Witten's discovery provided an opportunity to bring together researchers working in Chern-Simons theory for a meeting, and the resulting conference, which took place during the summer of 2009 at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, included many of the leading experts in the field. This volume documents the activities of the conference and presents several original research articles, including another monumental paper by Witten that is sure to stimulate further activity in this and related fields. This collection will provide an excellent overview of the current research directions and recent progress in Chern-Simons gauge theory.

Author: Helmut Hofer
Publisher: Birkhäuser
ISBN: 3034892179
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 688

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Book Description
Andreas Floer died on May 15, 1991 an untimely and tragic death. His visions and far-reaching contributions have significantly influenced the developments of mathematics. His main interests centered on the fields of dynamical systems, symplectic geometry, Yang-Mills theory and low dimensional topology. Motivated by the global existence problem of periodic solutions for Hamiltonian systems and starting from ideas of Conley, Gromov and Witten, he developed his Floer homology, providing new, powerful methods which can be applied to problems inaccessible only a few years ago. This volume opens with a short biography and three hitherto unpublished papers of Andreas Floer. It then presents a collection of invited contributions, and survey articles as well as research papers on his fields of interest, bearing testimony of the high esteem and appreciation this brilliant mathematician enjoyed among his colleagues. Authors include: A. Floer, V.I. Arnold, M. Atiyah, M. Audin, D.M. Austin, S.M. Bates, P.J. Braam, M. Chaperon, R.L. Cohen, G. Dell' Antonio, S.K. Donaldson, B. D'Onofrio, I. Ekeland, Y. Eliashberg, K.D. Ernst, R. Finthushel, A.B. Givental, H. Hofer, J.D.S. Jones, I. McAllister, D. McDuff, Y.-G. Oh, L. Polterovich, D.A. Salamon, G.B. Segal, R. Stern, C.H. Taubes, C. Viterbo, A. Weinstein, E. Witten, E. Zehnder.

Author: Marcos Marino
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198568495
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
This book provides an introduction to some of the most recent developments in string theory, and in particular to their mathematical implications and their impact in knot theory and algebraic geometry.

Author: Sen Hu
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9810239092
Category : Gauge fields (Physics).
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
This monograph is based on lectures on topological quantum field theory given in 1989 at Princeton University by E. Witten, in which he unified several important mathematical works in terms of the Donaldson polynomial, Gromov/Floer homology, and Jones polynomials. Witten explained his three-dimensional construction of Jones polynomials, "an elegant construction of a new polynomial invariant in three-dimensional space" (per the author), via quantization of Chern-Simons gauge theory. Hu (Princeton U.) adds missing details and some new developments in the field. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR.

Author: Mokhtar Hassaine
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9814730955
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 149

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Book Description
'The authors provide an up-to-date, well-organised background and essential elements of supergravity notions as well as all relevant aspects of Chern-Simons forms in gravitation. The book is a self-contained, informative, and much-needed broad introduction into the latest quantum gravity concepts, with a main focus on Chern-Simons gravity and supersymmetry … The book represents a comprehensive and systematic pedagogical exposition on gravitational Chern-Simons (Super)gravity theories, their applications, together with a selection of related recent developments in the field.'Contemporary PhysicsThis book grew out of a set of lecture notes on gravitational Chern-Simons (CS) theories developed over the past decade for several schools and different audiences including graduate students and researchers.CS theories are gauge-invariant theories that can include gravity consistently. They are only defined in odd dimensions and represent a very special class of theories in the Lovelock family. Lovelock gravitation theories are the natural extensions of General Relativity for dimensions greater than four that yield second-order field equations for the metric. These theories also admit local supersymmetric extensions where supersymmetry is an off-shell symmetry of the action, as in a standard gauge theory.Apart from the arguments of mathematical elegance and beauty, the gravitational CS actions are exceptionally endowed with physical attributes that suggest the viability of a quantum interpretation. CS theories are gauge-invariant, scale-invariant and background independent; they have no dimensional coupling constants. All constants in the Lagrangian are fixed rational coefficients that cannot be adjusted without destroying gauge invariance. This exceptional status of CS systems makes them classically interesting to study, and quantum mechanically intriguing and promising.

Author: Sen Hu
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9814494658
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
This invaluable monograph has arisen in part from E Witten's lectures on topological quantum field theory in the spring of 1989 at Princeton University. At that time Witten unified several important mathematical works in terms of quantum field theory, most notably the Donaldson polynomial, the Gromov-Floer homology and the Jones polynomials.In his lectures, among other things, Witten explained his intrinsic three-dimensional construction of Jones polynomials via Chern-Simons gauge theory. He provided both a rigorous proof of the geometric quantization of the Chern-Simons action and a very illuminating view as to how the quantization arises from quantization of the space of connections. He constructed a projective flat connection for the Hilbert space bundle over the space of complex structures, which becomes the Knizhik-Zamolodchikov equations in a special case. His construction leads to many beautiful applications, such as the derivation of the skein relation and the surgery formula for knot invariant, a proof of Verlinde's formula, and the establishment of a connection with conformal field theory.In this book, Sen Hu has added material to provide some of the details left out of Witten's lectures and to update some new developments. In Chapter 4 he presents a construction of knot invariant via representation of mapping class groups based on the work of Moore-Seiberg and Kohno. In Chapter 6 he offers an approach to constructing knot invariant from string theory and topological sigma models proposed by Witten and Vafa. The localization principle is a powerful tool to build mathematical foundations for such cohomological quantum field theories.In addition, some highly relevant material by S S Chern and E Witten has been included as appendices for the convenience of readers: (1) Complex Manifold without Potential Theory by S S Chern, pp148-154. (2) “Geometric quantization of Chern-Simons gauge theory” by S Axelrod, S D Pietra and E Witten. (3) “On holomorphic factorization of WZW and Coset models” by E Witten.

Author: Jørgen E. Andersen
Publisher: American Mathematical Soc.
ISBN: 0821888536
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
In 1989, Edward Witten discovered a deep relationship between quantum field theory and knot theory, and this discovery created a new field of research called Chern-Simons theory. This volume documents the activities of a conference which took place in 2009 and focused on Chern-Simons theory.

Author: Raoul Bott
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1475739516
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
Developed from a first-year graduate course in algebraic topology, this text is an informal introduction to some of the main ideas of contemporary homotopy and cohomology theory. The materials are structured around four core areas: de Rham theory, the Cech-de Rham complex, spectral sequences, and characteristic classes. By using the de Rham theory of differential forms as a prototype of cohomology, the machineries of algebraic topology are made easier to assimilate. With its stress on concreteness, motivation, and readability, this book is equally suitable for self-study and as a one-semester course in topology.

Author: Bojko Bakalov
Publisher: American Mathematical Soc.
ISBN: 0821826867
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
This book gives an exposition of the relations among the following three topics: monoidal tensor categories (such as a category of representations of a quantum group), 3-dimensional topological quantum field theory, and 2-dimensional modular functors (which naturally arise in 2-dimensional conformal field theory). The following examples are discussed in detail: the category of representations of a quantum group at a root of unity and the Wess-Zumino-Witten modular functor. The idea that these topics are related first appeared in the physics literature in the study of quantum field theory. Pioneering works of Witten and Moore-Seiberg triggered an avalanche of papers, both physical and mathematical, exploring various aspects of these relations. Upon preparing to lecture on the topic at MIT, however, the authors discovered that the existing literature was difficult and that there were gaps to fill. The text is wholly expository and finely succinct. It gathers results, fills existing gaps, and simplifies some proofs. The book makes an important addition to the existing literature on the topic. It would be suitable as a course text at the advanced-graduate level.

Author: Abdus Salam
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9789810216634
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 700

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Book Description
This is a selection from over 250 papers published by Abdus Salam. Professor Salam has been Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College, London and Director of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, for which he was largely responsible for creating. He is one of the most distinguished theoretical physicists of his generation and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1979 for his work on the unification of electromagnetic and weak interactions. He is well known for his deep interest in the development of scientific research in the third world (to which ICTP is devoted) and has taken a leading part in setting up the Third World Academy. His research work has ranged widely over quantum field theory and all aspects of the theory of elementary particles and more recently into other fields, including high-temperature superconductivity and theoretical biology. The papers selected represent a cross section of his work covering the entire period of 50 years from his student days to the present.