Mathematical Physics

Skew Howe duality is based on a very simple observation: the set of n by m matrices has commuting action of SL_n and SL_m.  We can use this observation to study morphisms of GL_m representations using GL_n.  This perspective has proven very useful in recent years for studying quantum knot invariants and their categorifications.  I will survey work in this direction from the last 10 years, including more recent developments concerning annular skew Howe duality and annular knot invariants.

In this talk, intended for a broader audience, I promise to use techniques only at the level of university calculus. While staying at this level, our goal will be to learn conceptual lessons for categorification of quantum group invariants of knots and 3-manifolds, also known as the Witten-Reshetikhin-Turaev (or WRT) invariants. In particular, we will introduce new q-series invariants of 3-manifolds that have integer powers and integer coefficients and, if time permits, discuss their various constructions and properties. The talk is based on several papers with D. Pei and/or P. Putrov, C. Vafa, as well as ongoing work with C. Manolescu.

The cobordism hypothesis gives a functorial bijection between oriented 

n-dimensional fully local topological field theories, valued in some 

higher category C, and the fully dualizable object of C equipped with 

the structure of SO(n)-fixed point.  In this talk I'll explain recent 

works of Haugseng, Johnson-Freyd and Scheimbauer which construct a 

Morita 4-category of braided tensor categories, and I'll report on joint 

work with Brochier and Snyder which identifies two natural subcategories 

therein which are 3- and 4-dualizable.  These are the rigid braided 

tensor categories with enough compact projectives, and the braided 

fusion categories, respectively.  I'll also explain work in progress by 

us to construct SO(3)- and SO(4)-fixed point structures in each case, 

starting from ribbon and pre-modular categories, respectively.

Applying the cobordism hypothesis, we obtain 3- and 4-dimensional fully 

local TFT's, which extend the 2-dimensional TFT's we constructed with 

Ben-Zvi and Brochier, and which conjecturally relate to a number of 

constructions in the literature, including: skein modules, quantum 

A-polynomials, Crane-Kauffmann-Yetter invariants; hence our construction 

puts these on firm foundational grounds as fully local TFT's.  A key 

feature of our construction in dimension 3 is that we require the input 

braided tensor category neither to be finite, nor semi-simple, so this 

opens up new examples -- such as non-modularized quantum groups at roots 

of unity -- which were not obtainable by earlier methods.

In this talk I will describe joint work in progress with Andre Henriques to construct examples of Graeme Segal's functorial definition of 2d chiral conformal field theory. While Segal's definition originated in the 1980's, constructive aspects of the theory continue to be challenging, especially with regard to higher genus surfaces. I will motivate and introduce Segal's definition, and describe a new approach to constructing examples using von Neumann algebras. 

This project examines the structure of a certain category of representations of a Lie algebra called Whittaker modules. Whittaker modules generalize highest weight modules, and the structure of the category is similar to that of Bernstein-Gelfand-Gelfand’s category O. In particular, Whittaker modules have finite length composition series and all irreducible Whittaker modules appear as quotients of standard Whittaker modules, which are generalizations of Verma modules. Using the localization theory of Beilinson-Bernstein, one obtains a beautiful geometric description of Whittaker modules as twisted sheaves of D-modules on the associated flag variety. I use this geometric setting to develop an algorithm for computing the multiplicities of irreducible Whittaker modules in the composition series of standard Whittaker modules. This algorithm establishes that the multiplicities are determined by parabolic Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials.

In this talk we will review our physical proposal, with D. Persson and R. Volpato, to understand the genus zero property of monstrous moonshine. The latter was proven by Borcherds in 1992 by brute-force computation but has since resisted a conceptual understanding. We embed the Monster VOA of Frenkel-Lepowsky-Meurman into a heterotic string compactification and use physical arguments, i.e. T-dualities and decompactification limits, to understand the genus zero property. We find that the Monster Lie algebra (a Generalized, or Borcherds-Kac-Moody algebra) acts as a sort of "algebra of BPS states". We also sketch an analogous proposal, with S. Harrison and R. Volpato, for Conway moonshine using the type II string. Along the way we construct a new super Borcherds-Kac-Moody algebra on which the Conway group acts faithfully and prove its (twisted) denominator identities, which should be identified with BPS state counts in our string theory.