Room P4.35, Mathematics Building

John Huerta, Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon
What can higher categories do for physics? Part II

In this follow up to last year's talk, we briefly review the cobordism hypothesis that formed the subject of our first part, and then outline its use for the existence and construction of field theories, in particular Chern-Simons theory, as discussed in a 2009 paper of Freed, Hopkins, Lurie and Teleman.