Chern Simons Gauge Theory

In 1989, Edward Witten discovered a deep relationship between quantum field theory and knot theory, and this beautiful discovery created a new field of research called Chern-Simons theory. This field has the remarkable feature of intertwining a large number of diverse branches of research in mathematics and physics, among them low-dimensional topology, differential geometry, quantum algebra, functional and stochastic analysis, quantum gravity, and string theory. The 20-year anniversary of Witten's discovery provided an opportunity to bring together researchers working in Chern-Simons theory for a meeting, and the resulting conference, which took place during the summer of 2009 at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, included many of the leading experts in the field. This volume documents the activities of the conference and presents several original research articles, including another monumental paper by Witten that is sure to stimulate further activity in this and related fields. This collection will provide an excellent overview of the current research directions and recent progress in Chern-Simons gauge theory.

Andreas Floer died on May 15, 1991 an untimely and tragic death. His visions and far-reaching contributions have significantly influenced the developments of mathematics. His main interests centered on the fields of dynamical systems, symplectic geometry, Yang-Mills theory and low dimensional topology. Motivated by the global existence problem of periodic solutions for Hamiltonian systems and starting from ideas of Conley, Gromov and Witten, he developed his Floer homology, providing new, powerful methods which can be applied to problems inaccessible only a few years ago. This volume opens with a short biography and three hitherto unpublished papers of Andreas Floer. It then presents a collection of invited contributions, and survey articles as well as research papers on his fields of interest, bearing testimony of the high esteem and appreciation this brilliant mathematician enjoyed among his colleagues. Authors include: A. Floer, V.I. Arnold, M. Atiyah, M. Audin, D.M. Austin, S.M. Bates, P.J. Braam, M. Chaperon, R.L. Cohen, G. Dell' Antonio, S.K. Donaldson, B. D'Onofrio, I. Ekeland, Y. Eliashberg, K.D. Ernst, R. Finthushel, A.B. Givental, H. Hofer, J.D.S. Jones, I. McAllister, D. McDuff, Y.-G. Oh, L. Polterovich, D.A. Salamon, G.B. Segal, R. Stern, C.H. Taubes, C. Viterbo, A. Weinstein, E. Witten, E. Zehnder.

This invaluable monograph has arisen in part from E Witten's lectures on topological quantum field theory in the spring of 1989 at Princeton University. At that time Witten unified several important mathematical works in terms of quantum field theory, most notably the Donaldson polynomial, the Gromov-Floer homology and the Jones polynomials.In his lectures, among other things, Witten explained his intrinsic three-dimensional construction of Jones polynomials via Chern-Simons gauge theory. He provided both a rigorous proof of the geometric quantization of the Chern-Simons action and a very illuminating view as to how the quantization arises from quantization of the space of connections. He constructed a projective flat connection for the Hilbert space bundle over the space of complex structures, which becomes the Knizhik-Zamolodchikov equations in a special case. His construction leads to many beautiful applications, such as the derivation of the skein relation and the surgery formula for knot invariant, a proof of Verlinde's formula, and the establishment of a connection with conformal field theory.In this book, Sen Hu has added material to provide some of the details left out of Witten's lectures and to update some new developments. In Chapter 4 he presents a construction of knot invariant via representation of mapping class groups based on the work of Moore-Seiberg and Kohno. In Chapter 6 he offers an approach to constructing knot invariant from string theory and topological sigma models proposed by Witten and Vafa. The localization principle is a powerful tool to build mathematical foundations for such cohomological quantum field theories.In addition, some highly relevant material by S S Chern and E Witten has been included as appendices for the convenience of readers: (1) Complex Manifold without Potential Theory by S S Chern, pp148-154. (2) “Geometric quantization of Chern-Simons gauge theory” by S Axelrod, S D Pietra and E Witten. (3) “On holomorphic factorization of WZW and Coset models” by E Witten.

After an introduction to matrix models and Cherns-Simons gauge theory, this book describes in detail the topological string theories that correspond to these gauge theories and develops the mathematical implication of this duality for the enumerative geometry of Calabi-Yau manifolds and knot theory.

In 1989, Edward Witten discovered a deep relationship between quantum field theory and knot theory, and this discovery created a new field of research called Chern-Simons theory. This volume documents the activities of a conference which took place in 2009 and focused on Chern-Simons theory.

Self-duality greatly reduces the mathematical difficulties of a theory but it is also a notion of considerable physical significance. The new class of self-dual Chern-Simons theories discussed in detail in this book arise in the context of anyonic quantum field theory and have applications to models such as the quantum Hall effect, anyonic superconductivity, and Aharonov-Bohm scattering. There are also interesting connections with the theory of integrable models. The author presents the abelian and non-abelian models for relativistic and non-relativistic realizations of the self-dual Chern-Simons theories and finishes with some applications in quantum physics. The book is written for advanced students and researchers in mathematical, particle, and condensed matter physics.

Some of the most effective gauges in field theory are noncovariant gauges of the axial kind, such as the light-cone gauge and the temporal gauge. The principal advantage of these gauges stems from the decoupling of the fictitious particles in the theory. The purpose of this volume is to give a clear and readable account of the basic features and mathematical subtleties of these ghost-free gauges, and of their truly enormous range of applicability.In addition to explicit one-loop computations in Yang-Mills and Chern-Simons theory, the book contains detailed analysis of the unifield-gauge formalism and of the renormalization of Yang-Mills theory in the presence of nonlocal terms.

This book grew out of a set of lecture notes on gravitational Chern–Simons (CS) theories developed over the past decade for several schools and different audiences including graduate students and researchers. CS theories are gauge-invariant theories that can include gravity consistently. They are only defined in odd dimensions and represent a very special class of theories in the Lovelock family. Lovelock gravitation theories are the natural extensions of General Relativity for dimensions greater than four that yield second-order field equations for the metric. These theories also admit local supersymmetric extensions where supersymmetry is an off-shell symmetry of the action, as in a standard gauge theory. Apart from the arguments of mathematical elegance and beauty, the gravitational CS actions are exceptionally endowed with physical attributes that suggest the viability of a quantum interpretation. CS theories are gauge-invariant, scale-invariant and background independent; they have no dimensional coupling constants. All constants in the Lagrangian are fixed rational coefficients that cannot be adjusted without destroying gauge invariance. This exceptional status of CS systems makes them classically interesting to study, and quantum mechanically intriguing and promising. Contents:The Quantum Gravity PuzzleGeometry: General OverviewFirst Order Gravitation TheoryGravity in Higher DimensionsChern–Simons GravitiesAdditional Features of Chern–Simons GravityBlack Holes, Particles and BranesSupersymmetry and SupergravityChern–Simons SupergravitiesInönü–Wigner Contractions and Its ExtensionsUnconventional SupersymmetriesConcluding Remarks Readership: This book provides an introduction to Chern–Simons (super) gravity theories accessible for physics as well as mathematics graduate students and researchers. Key Features:The topics described in this book are self-contained and just require some basic background in physics and mathematics. Chern–Simons supergravity is a field which is intensively studied in the current literature of physics and mathematics, with more than 2000 articles related to this topic in the arXiv databaseThis title covers a topic not usually discussed either in standard gravity courses or in mathematical presentations of characteristic classes or cohomologyKeywords:Supergravity;Supersymmetry;Gauge Theory