Conference

The tremendous empirical success of Einstein's relativity has pushed Aether into a chapter in the history books, for nearly a century. However, a phenomenologically consistent quantum mechanical treatment of gravity has motivated a revival of aether, by taming its UV-divergences, or the cosmological constant problem. Here I will outline the phenomenological implications of a physically motivated aether model. I will also discuss how aether could potentially evade traditional tests of Lorentz violation, through strong coupling. 

This talk reviews the idea of quantum gravity with anisotropic scaling, and presents a scenario in which this theory of gravity is coupled to matter, described by the standard model or beyond.This "multicritical universe" scenario predicts systematic, energy-dependent, calculable Lorentz-violating corrections to the relativistic dispersion relations of matter.

In this talk I will review recent results we obtained regarding the computation of Wilson loops in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence. According to such correspondence Wilson loops are related to minimal area surfaces in hyperbolic space. The problem reduces to solving a set of non-linear but integrable differential equations. The solutions can be expressed in terms of Riemann theta functions. Other methods such as the dressing method applied to this problem will also be discussed.

I will outline a couple of constructions of co-Higgs bundles, which are holomorphic vector bundles with Higgs fields taking values in the tangent bundle. One reason why these objects are interesting is that they are precisely the generalized holomorphic bundles on an ordinary complex manifold considered as a generalized complex manifold. One method produces a co-Higgs bundle on any complex manifold; in a sense, this is the canonical co-Higgs bundle. The other is specifically for the projective plane. Recall that one of the earliest constructions of (interesting) vector bundles
on a complex surface was Schwarzenberger's construction of a rank-2 vector bundle on the projective plane from a double cover. I hope to breathe new life into this object by showing that the bundle carries a natural O(1)-valued Higgs field, which can be pushed to a T-valued Higgs field on P2. For both examples, we will discuss some aspects of their stability and deformation theory.

Matrix models yield a theory of random two dimensional surfaces. They support a 1/N expansion dominated by planar graphs (corresponding to planar surfaces) and undergo a phase transition to a continuum theory. In higher dimensions matrix models generalize to tensor models. In the absence of a viable 1=N expansion, tensor models have for a long time been less successful in providing a theory of random higher dimensional spaces. This situation has drastically changed recently. Models for a non-symmetric complex tensor have been shown to admit a 1/N expansion dominated by graphs of spherical topology in arbitrary dimensions and to undergo a phase transition to a continuum theory. I will present an overview of these results and discuss their implications.

This talk will give a survey of some recent developments on the construction and classification of compact manifolds with holonomy G2 and their calibrated submanifolds. After reviewing previous work we concentrate on the following three developments: (a) the construction of many new compact G2 manifolds using weak Fano 3-folds; (b) the construction of many compact G2 manifolds containing rigid associative 3-folds; (c) the diffeomorphism classification of (2-connected) G2 manifolds obtained by twisted connect sums. If time permits we will mention new questions
suggested by our results. This work is joint with Alessio Corti, Johannes Nordstrom, and Tommaso Pacini.

In this talk, I will discuss my recent works with J. Streets on curvature ows on Hermitian manifolds and show how they can be used to study generalized Kahler manifolds. I will also show how they are related to the renormalization group ow coupled with B- elds. Some open problems will be discussed. In the end, I will also discuss briey a new ow which preserves symplectic structures.

Asymptotically conical (AC) Calabi-Yau manifolds are Ricci-at Kahler manifolds that resemble a Ricci-at Kahler cone at infinity. I will describe an existence theorem for AC Calabi-Yau manifolds which, in particular, yields a refinement of an existence theorem of Tian and Yau for such manifolds. I will also discuss some examples. This is ongoing work with Hans-Joachim Hein.

I will discuss some joint work with K. Uhlenbeck. There is a general method for constructing soliton hierarchies from a splitting of Lie algebras. We explain how formal scattering and inverse scattering, Hamiltonian structures, commuting conservation laws, Backlund transformations, tau functions, and Virasoro actions on tau functions can all be constructed in a uni ed way from such splittings.

When considering flat unitary bundles on a punctured Riemann surface, it is often convenient to have a space that includes all possible holonomies around the punctures; such a space is provided by the extended moduli space of Jeffrey. On the other hand, there are certain inconveniences, in particular no clear link to complex geometry via a Narasimhan-Seshadri type theorem. It turns out that the situation can be remedied quite nicely by considering bundles with framings taking values in a Grassmannian. Analogs for general structure groups, and in particular links with recent work of Martens and Thaddeus, will also be discussed. (This is joint work with U. Bhosle and I. Biswas.)