An inextricable link : semi-classics and complex saddles

I will discuss the use of semi-classics and instanton calculus and argue that, contrary to common wisdom, complex solutions of the equations of motion are a necessary ingredient of semi-classical expansion. In particular, I will show that without the complex solutions semi-classical expansion of supersymmetric theories cannot be reconciled with the constraints of supersymmetry. This has a natural interpretation in the Picard-Lefschetz theory.

Geometric Morphometrics for Motion Analysis of Biological Soft Tissues

Biological soft tissues can suffer for very large size and shape changes during their motion, and the ability to quantify and compare the movements of organisms is a central focus of many studies in biology: our goal is to compare the motion of a same organ from different individuals, as example, the motion of the beating heart from different humans.
 
Geometric Morphometrics began with the seminal contributions of D.G. Kendall, gathered in the book Shape and Shape Theory (1999) where it has been proposed to sample the configuration of a body through the m coordinates of k landmarks; thus a configuration is represented with a point in an m x k space, called the Configuration Space.
 
Then, to effectively represent a shape, it must be defined a quotient of the Configuration Space with respect to a Lie Group of transformations, a group that is selected according to specific needs.
 
Here, we discuss different possible choices of quotient spaces and their implications: dealing with soft tissues the differences between individuals can be very large, and thus the crucial point for quantifying differences in the motion is to filter inter-individual shape differences.
 
We proposed to solve this problem by performing a data centering in the so-called Size-and-Shape Space, by means of the Riemannian parallel transport. Theoretical considerations, together with analysis on real heart data from human left ventricle suggest that when configurations differ for small Procrustes Distances, the parallel transport can be well approximated by a Euclidean translation, after a hierarchical alignment.

Beta-coalescents and stable Galton-Watson trees

Plus d’informations sur : http://www.proba.jussieu.fr/pageperso/anr-graal/

String amplitudes of type IIA,IIB string theory with their α’ corrections

We would like to make various remarks on string amplitudes in type II string theory in which getting the exact and final form of the world sheet integrals up to five point mixed closed-open amplitudes to all orders are given.

We are also going to to talk about all kinds of effective actions involving DBI, Chern-Simons and more importantly new Wess Zumino actions. Indeed we try to provide a comprehensive explanation even for D-brane-anti D-brane systems. We also introduce various new techniques to be able to derive all order α’ corrections to all type II super string effective actions. If time allows, we then mention several issues related to those effective actions as well.

Cours Master2 « graphes aléatoires »

Dans ce cours nous étudierons plusieurs modèles de graphes aléatoires allant du plus classique (le modèle d'Erdös-Renyi introduit en 1960) aux plus récents (les cartes planaires aléatoires étudiées depuis le début des années 2000). Le fil conducteur du cours sera la notion de convergence locale et les propriétés des graphes limites dits dilués.

Contenu du cours :

– Modèle d'Erdös-Renyi, transition de phase et propriétés de base
– Convergence locale et "méthode objective" d'Aldous et Steele
– Arbre couvrant minimum et théorème de Frieze 
– Graphes aléatoires unimodulaires
– Limites locales d'arbres aléatoires
– Limites locales de cartes aléatoires (construction, épluchage, théorème de Benjamini-Schramm)

Scattering of Stringy States and T-duality

I shall briefly review the salient features of target space duality (T-duality) and recall some essential results. I shall outline a prescription to derive the S-matrix for the scattering of massless stringy states that arise in the compactification of closed bosonic strings on a torus at the tree level. It will be shown that the S-matrix elements can be expressed in a T-duality invariant form. The Kawai-Lewellen-Tye formalism plays an important role in our approach.

Conformal Universe as false vacuum decay

We point out that the (pseudo-)conformal Universe scenario may be realized as decay of conformally invariant, metastable vacuum, which proceeds via spontaneous nucleation and subsequent growth of a bubble of a putative new phase. We study perturbations about the bubble and show that their leading late-time properties coincide with those inherent in the original models with homogeneously rolling backgrounds. In particular, the perturbations of a spectator dimension-zero field have flat power spectrum. (arXiv:1502.05897)

Geometric construction of buildings for hyperbolic Kac-Moody groups

A twin building is a simplicial complex associated to a group G with a twin BN-pair. A complex hyperbolic Kac-Moody (KM) group G is associated with a hyperbolic KM Lie algebra g = g(A), where A is a hyperbolic type Cartan matrix. The invariant symmetric bilinear form (. , .) on the standard Cartan subalgebra h in g has signature (n-1,1) on the split real form of h, providing a Lorentzian geometry. The Cartan-Chevalley involution on g gives a « compact" real form k of g, a real Lie algebra whose complexification is g, whose Cartan subalgebra t also has Lorentzian form (. , .), and there is also a corresponding compact real group K. We are able to embed the twin building for G inside the union of all « lightcones" {x in k | (x,x) <= 0} which is in the union of all K conjugates of t.  This provides a geometrical realization of the twin building of G closely related to the structure of all Cartan subalgebras in k, and sheds light on the geometry of the infinite dimensional groups G and K. This is especially interesting in the case of rank 3 hyperbolic algebras whose Weyl groups are hyperbolic triangle groups, so that the building is a union of copies of the tesselated Poincaré disk with certain boundary lines identified. This is joint work with Lisa Carbone (Rutgers University) and Walter Freyn (TU-Darmstadt).

Motivic invariants of l-adic sheaves

I will give an overview of a project aimed at understanding the motivic nature of l-adic sheaves. I will survey motivating questions about independence of l and past results of Lafforgue, Drinfeld, and others. I will then discuss how to incorporate correspondences into the theory, recent results, and open questions.

The role of microRNAs in muscle differentiation

MicroRNAs are recently discovered regulators of gene expression, coordinating many biological processes. They are especially important for developmental processes, including cell differentiation, while their deregulation causes diseases like cancer.
In particular, microRNAs are key regulators of muscle differentiation, a complex process necessary for the formation of muscle fibers. I’ll describe the regulation of skeletal muscle differentiation by the miR-98 – E2F5 molecular pathway.

A Diagram Representation of Interactions of Modules in Biological Molecules

After overviewing the representation of biological molecules, I introduce the representation of interactions between modules in the proteins with the SO(3) rotation of the peptide unit introduced by Penner et al.. Using protein data in PDB, I will show our representation with the SO(3) rotation is useful in characterizing the structure and its change due to the mutation or the native dynamical change with time. I also discuss some possible potential extensions of our approach to the chromatin structure.

Parallel transport and the p-adic Simpson correspondence

Deninger and Werner developed an analogue for p-adic curves of the classical correspondence of Narasimhan and Seshadri between stable bundles of degree zero and unitary representations of the fundamental group of a complex smooth proper curve. Using parallel transport, they associated functorially to every vector bundle on a p-adic curve whose reduction is strongly semi-stable of degree 0 a p-adic representation of the fundamental group of the curve. They asked several questions: whether their functor is fully faithful and what is its essential image; whether the cohomology of the local systems produced by this functor admits a Hodge-Tate decomposition; and whether their construction is compatible with the p-adic Simpson correspondence developed by Faltings. We will answer these questions in this talk.