Mathematical physics

Work of Bezrukavnikov on local geometric Langlands correspondence and works of Gorsky, Neguţ, Rasmussen and Oblomkov, Rozansky on knot homology and matrix factorizations suggest that there should be a categorical version of a certain natural homomorphism from the affine Hecke algebra to the finite Hecke algebra in type A, sending basis lattice elements on the affine side to Jucys-Murphy elements on the finite side. I will try to explain some of the structures involved and will talk about recent progress towards a construction of such a categorification in the setting of Hecke categories.

I will sketch why self-dual versions of the moduli of G-Higgs bundles are expected to arise physically from the study of 4d theories of class S. I will then describe an extension of the Langlands duality results of Hausel-Thaddeus (G=SL(n)) and Donagi-Pantev (arbitrary reductive G) that yields self-dual moduli spaces as a corollary.

The Alday-Gaiotto-Tachikawa correspondence connects gauge theory on a fourfold with conformal field theory. We are interested in a certain algebro-geometric incarnation of this framework, where the fourfold is an algebraic surface and instantons/differential geometry are replaced with sheaves/algebraic geometry. In this talk, we will present a certain approach to AGT that yields partial results for quite general surfaces, and ask questions about what still needs to be done to state and prove the full correspondence in the language of algebraic geometry.

The localization theorem, which has played a central role in representation theory since its discovery in the 1980s, identifies a regular block of Category O for a semisimple Lie algebra with certain D-modules on its flag variety. In this talk we will explain work in progress which produces a similar picture for the Virasoro algebra and more generally for affine W-algebras. Some new purely algebraic input is (i) a version of the Feigin-Fuchs duality between Verma modules for Vir at central charges c and 26 - c, which applies to all smooth representations and other affine W-algebras, and (ii) a linkage principle for representations in category O of a W-algebra. As geometric input, we will explain how to (i) adapt the Beilinson-Drinfeld construction of vertex algebras via factorization spaces to also produce representations and in particular (ii) develop a factorizable version of affine Borel--Weil--Bott.