Talks

The Witten d-bar equation is a generalization of the parametrized holomorphic curve equation associated to a holomorphic function (superpotential) on a Kahler manifold X. It plays a central role in the work of Gaiotto-Moore-Witten on the "algebra of the infrared". The talk will explain an "intrinsic" point of view on the equation as a condition on a real surface S embedded into X (i.e., not involving any parametrization of S). This is possible if S is not a holomorphic curve in the usual sense.

We construct an action of the Weyl group on the affine closure of the cotangent bundle on G/U. The construction involves Hamiltonian reduction with respect to the `universal centralizer' and an interesting Lagrangian variety, the Miura variety. A closely related construction produces symplectic manifolds which play a role in `Sicilian theories' and whose existence was conjectured by Moore and Tachikawa. Some of these constructions may be reinterpreted, via the Geometric Satake, in terms of the affine grassmannian.

The index of rigidity was introduced by Katz as the Euler characteristic of de Rham cohomology of End-connection of a meromorphic connection on curve. As its name suggests, the index valuates the rigidity of the connection on curve. Especially, in P^1 case, this index makes a significant contribution together with middle convolution. Namely Katz showed that regular singular connection on P^1 can be reduced to a rank 1 connection by middle convolution if and only if the index of rigidity is 2. After that, the work of Crawley-Boevey gave an interpretation of the index of rigidity and the Katz' algorithm from the theory of root system. Namely, he gave a realization of moduli spaces of regular singular connections on a trivial bundle as quiver varieties. In this setting the index of rigidity can be naturally computed by the Euler form of quiver, and the Katz algorithm can be understood as a special example of the theory of Weyl group orbits of positive roots of the quiver. I will give an overview of this story with a generalization to the case of irregular singular connections. Moreover, I will introduce an algebraic curve associated to a linear differential equation on Riemann surface as an analogy of the spectral curve of Higgs bundle. And compare some indices of singularities of differential equation and its associated curve, Milnor numbers and Komatsu-Malgrange irregularities. Finally as a corollary of this comparison of local indices, I will give a comparison between cohomology of the curve and de Rham cohomology of the differential equation and show the coincidence of the index of rigidity and the Euler characteristic of the associated curve.

Hayden and Van Dam showed that starting with a separable state in Alice and Bob’s state space and a shared entangled state in a common bipartite resource space, then using local unitary operations, it is possible to produce an entangled pair in the state space while at the same time only perturbing the shared entangled state by a small amount, which can be made arbitrarily small as the dimension of the resource space grows. They referred to this as “embezzling entanglement” since numerically it “appears" that the resource state was returned exactly.

It is natural to wonder if using an infinite dimensional resource space and local operations, one can return the resource state exactly while producing an entangled state in their state space. Whether or not you can achieve this phenomenon of “perfect embezzlement of an entangled state” depends on which mathematical model one uses to describe “local”.

We prove that perfect embezzlement is impossible in the tensor model but is possible in the commuting model. We then relate this to current work on the conjectures of Connes and Tsirelson about different models for quantum conditional probabilities.

This talk is based on joint work with R. Cleve, L. Liu and S. Harris.