05/07/2016, 15:30 — 16:30 — Room P3.10, Mathematics Building
Daniel Berwick-Evans, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Elliptic cohomology, loop group representations, and 2-dimensional field theories
Elliptic cohomology, loop group representations, and 2-dimensional field theories have been linked since birth, though the precise nature of the relationship remains quite mysterious. I'll talk about some recent progress, wherein physics-inspired techniques over moduli spaces of (super) tori furnish analytic constructions of Euler classes in elliptic cohomology over the complex numbers. These classes have equivariant refinements (also constructed via field theory techniques) that can be identified with characters of positive energy representations of loop groups. This is joint work with Arnav Tripathy.
