The Department of Physics and Astronomy invites all to a colloquium featuring Ingmar Saberi, Particle Theory, California Institute of Technology. Ingmar Saberi will present his talk, “A rough-and-ready introduction to some mathematical applications of quantum field theory”, Tuesday, August 30, at 4:10 p.m. in Webster B17.
Meet for refreshments before the lecture at 3:45 – 4:10 p.m. in the foyer on floor G above the lecture hall.
Abstract: Over the last thirty-five or forty years, there has been a renewed conversation between theoretical physicists and pure mathematicians at the frontiers of their respective fields, ending a hiatus that began earlier in the twentieth century as high-energy physicists dedicated themselves to the construction of quantum field theory. Ironically, the focus of this new dialogue is nothing other than quantum field theory! In this talk, which I hope will be reasonably accessible to a broad audience, I’ll focus on the main themes and central lessons of one particular joint project that has appeared at the crossroads between physics and math: constructing quantum field theories that are simple enough to be rigorously understood and exactly solved, but complicated enough to be interesting. A good synecdoche for this kind of work is “topological quantum field theory.” I’ll discuss what this is, and look at a couple of examples in which physicists’ understanding of quantum field theory led to surprising and groundbreaking new results and conjectures in pure mathematics. If time permits, I’ll also touch on recent work in which the lesson went the other way: that is, thinking mathematically or geometrically about a physical model gave rise to new and unexpected generalizations of substantial physical interest.
