3:30 pm Thursday, October 22, 2020
Geometry Seminar: Topological strings and BPS states by Andy Neitzke (Yale University) in Zoom
Topological string theory was introduced by Bershadsky-Cecotti-Ooguri-Vafa in 1993. For most of the 2000's I tried to understand how the "partition function" they introduced as a formal series could be viewed as a geometric object beyond its series expansion. I still do not really understand this. Luckily, though, thinking about it forced me and my collaborators to learn various things about twistor spaces, which turned out to be a key clue to understanding what Kontsevich and Soibelman were saying about BPS states (generalized Donaldson-Thomas invariants), and to later applications of that theory to hyperkahler geometry / WKB analysis. Recently these ideas seem to be feeding back into the original questions about the topological string, though the complete picture is not yet clear, at least to me. I will try to describe some of this story. It involves joint work with many people including Boris Pioline, Murat Gunaydin, Andrew Waldron, Johannes Walcher, Davide Gaiotto, Greg Moore. Submitted by
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