Conference

I'll discuss elliptic cohomology from a physical perspective, indicating the importance of the Segal-Stolz-Teichner conjecture and joint work with D. Berwick-Evans on rigorously proving some of these physical predictions.

Thirteen years ago, Lurie has sketched a way to obtain equivariant elliptic cohomology and equivariant topological modular forms without the need to restrict to rational or complex coefficients. Recently, David Gepner and I have found one way to flesh out the details and and provide computations in the U(1)-equivariant case. On this work I will report.

Projective vector bundles (or gerbe modules) are generalizations of vector bundles in the presence of a gerbe on manifolds. Given a projective vector bundle, we will first show how to use it to twist the Witten genus to get modular invariants, which we call projective elliptic genera. Then we will give two applications: (1) given any pseudodifferential operator, we will construct modular invariants generalizing the Witten genus, which corresponds to the Dirac operator; (2) we will enhance the Hori map in T-duality to the graded Hori map and show that it sends Jacobi forms to Jacobi forms. This represents our joint works with Mathai.