Learning Seminar on S-Duality
In the Spring Quarter at Northwestern we're running a learning seminar with
the aim of understanding some ideas from S-duality in physics, with the
particular goal of understanding the relationship between observables that
are interchanged in an interesting way under S-duality with more familiar
objects in mathematics.
We'll meet twice a week, on Tuesdays at 2pm and
Thursdays at 11am in Lunt 102.
Schedule
Tuesday April 2nd: Introduction and Motivation (Kevin, Chris)
Thursday April 4th: Twisting Supersymmetric Field Theories (Chris)
Tuesday April 9th: Twisting 2d Supersymmetric Sigma Models (Peng)
Thursday April 11th: Examples of Twisted Theories and Higgs Bundles (Kevin)
Tuesday April 16th: The Holomorphic Twist of N=4 SYM (Phil)
Thursday April 18th: Lagrangians for Twisted SUSY Yang-Mills (Kevin)
Tuesday April 23rd:Seiberg-Witten Theory (Brian)
Thursday April 25th: Line and Surface Operators (Chris)
Tuesday April 30th: Recapitulation in Physics Notation I (Eric)
Thursday May 2nd: Hecke Modifications (Aron)
Tuesday May 7th: Recapitulation in Physics Notation II (Eric)
Thursday May 9th: Dimensional Reduction (Phil)
Tuesday May 14th: Hyperkahler Geometry of the Hitchin System (Michael)
Thursday May 16th: The P^1 of Topological twists of N=4 SYM (Kevin)
Tuesday May 21st: The Phase Space and Cotangent Quantisation (Chris)
Thursday May 23rd: Further Examples of Quantisation of Operators (Kevin)
Tuesday May 28th: Wilson Operators from the Atiyah-Segal Perspective (Phil)
Thursday May 30th: Hecke Correspondences from Circle Operators (Kevin)
Tuesday June 4th: Conclusion and Discussion
References
- Costello, Notes on Supersymmetric and Holomorphic Field Theories in Dimensions 2 and 4
- Costello, Supersymmetric Gauge Theory and the Yangian
- Donagi and Pantev, Lectures on the Geometric Langlands Conjecture and Non-Abelian Hodge Theory
- Frenkel, Lectures on the Langlands Program and Conformal Field Theory
- Gukov and Witten, Gauge Theory, Ramification, and the Geometric Langlands Program
- Kapustin, Langlands Duality and Topological Field Theory
- Kapustin and Witten, Electric-Magnetic Duality and the Geometric Langlands Program
- Vafa and Witten, A Strong Coupling Test of S-Duality
- Vonk, A Mini-Course on Topological Strings
- Witten, Geometric Langlands from Six Dimensions
- Witten, Introduction to Cohomological Field Theories
- Witten, Topological Quantum Field Theory
- Yamron, Topological Actions from Twisted Supersymmetric Theories
Participants
Kevin Costello, Michael Couch, Chris Elliott, Honghao Gao, Aron Heleodoro, Ian Le, Matt Mahowald, Yuan Shen,
Brian Williams, Phil-Sang Yoo, Peng Zhou, Eric Zaslow