Witten in the 80s Seminar

Tuesdays and Thursdays 12:30-2, 736 Evans Hall

Fall 2011

Dan Berwick-Evans and Theo Johnson-Freyd

The focus of this seminar will be a few of Witten's foundational papers from the 80s. When possible, we will try to reformulate the ideas in more modern language. Roughly, September is warm-up month, October is elliptic month, and November is Jones polynomial month. Email me if you would like to speak.

There will be some talks on related material in the GRASP and subfactor seminars, which meet on Friday at 2 and 3 respectively. The relevant dates will be posted here once the talks are scheduled.

Proposed Reading List

"Supersymmetry and Morse Theory," Witten 1982

"Physics and Geometry," Witten 1986

"Elliptic Genera and Quantum Field Theory," Witten 1987

"The Index of the Dirac Operator on Loop Space," Witten 1987

"New Invariants of 3- and 4-Manifolds," Atiyah 1987

"Elliptic Cohomology," Segal 1988

"Topological Quantum Field Theory," Witten 1988

"Topological Quantum Field Theory," Atiyah 1988

"Topological Sigma Models," Witten 1988

"The Topological Sigma Model," Baulieu and Singer 1989

"Quantum Field Theory and the Jones Polynomial," Witten 1989

List of Speakers and Talks

September 20th, What is a Sigma Model?, Dan Berwick-Evans. Notes.

September 22nd, Some History, AJ Tolland. Notes.

September 23rd, Supersymmetry and Topology, Dan Berwick-Evans (in the GRASP seminar, 2-3 in 736 Evans).

September 27th, Introduction to Supermanifolds, Aaron Mazel-Gee. Notes.

September 29th, October 4th, and 6th, Supersymmetric Quantum Mechanics and Morse Theory, Dan Berwick-Evans. Notes.

October 11th, 13th, 18th and 20th, Q-Manifolds and BRST Gauge Fixing, Theo Johnson-Freyd. Notes I.