Autumn Meeting in Mathematical Physics

Talk by    

Date: 08.10.10  Time: 14.00 - 18.00  Room: ETH HIT K 52

15.00-15.45 Jiří Černý, Dynamics of spin-glasses.

- Tea -

16.15-17.00 Daniel Egli, A mathematical model of friction

17.15-18.00 Alberto Cattaneo, Classical and perturbative topological field theories with boundary

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Speaker: Jiří Černý

Title: Dynamics of spin-glasses.

Abstract: Spin glasses are known to have some very interesting dynamical properties, like aging, rejuvenation and memory, which are hard to understand theoretically. In my talk I will give survey of recent mathematical results on this subject and point out few open problems.

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Speaker: Alberto Cattaneo,

Title: Classical and perturbative topological field theories with boundary

Abstract: Topological quantum field theories may be defined as appropriate functors from the cobordism category. The classical and perturbative versions thereof have started to be investigated only recently. We discuss topological field theories in the AKSZ formalism (this includes Chern-Simons and BF theories as well as the Poisson sigma model). In this case, to boundary components (objects) one can associate a symplectic manifold and a coisotropic submanifold thereof, whereas to cobordisms one associates canonical relations. This very natural construction (a special case with more structure than the general one recently introduced by V. Fock), yields to new viewpoints on, say, the moduli space of flat connections or the symplectic groupoid of a Poisson manifold. This also constitutes the starting point for the perturbative quantization of these theories. The possibility of including boundaries of boundaries (and so on) naturally yields to a Lurie-type description. Eventually, one may hope to be able to reconstruct perturbative topological field theories by gluing simple pieces. This is based on joint work with P. Mnev and N. Reshetikhin.