Noncommutative Geometry And Physics 4 Workshop On Strings Membranes And Topological Field Theory

This book is a collection of the lectures and talks presented in the Tohoku Forum for Creativity in the thematic year 2015 "Fundamental Problems in Quantum Physics: Strings, Black Holes and Quantum Information", and related events in the period 2014–2016. This volume especially contains an overview of recent developments in the theory of strings and membranes, as well as topological field theory.

This volume offers an introduction, in the form of four extensive lectures, to some recent developments in several active topics at the interface between geometry, topology and quantum field theory. The first lecture is by Christine Lescop on knot invariants and configuration spaces, in which a universal finite-type invariant for knots is constructed as a series of integrals over configuration spaces. This is followed by the contribution of Raimar Wulkenhaar on Euclidean quantum field theory from a statistical point of view. The author also discusses possible renormalization techniques on noncommutative spaces. The third lecture is by Anamaria Font and Stefan Theisen on string compactification with unbroken supersymmetry. The authors show that this requirement leads to internal spaces of special holonomy and describe Calabi-Yau manifolds in detail. The last lecture, by Thierry Fack, is devoted to a K-theory proof of the Atiyah-Singer index theorem and discusses some applications of K-theory to noncommutative geometry. These lectures notes, which are aimed in particular at graduate students in physics and mathematics, start with introductory material before presenting more advanced results. Each chapter is self-contained and can be read independently.

Noncommutative geometry is a novel approach which is opening up new possibilities for geometry from a mathematical viewpoint. It is also providing new tools for the investigation of quantum space?time in physics. Recent developments in string theory have supported the idea of quantum spaces, and have strongly stimulated the research in this field. This self-contained volume contains survey lectures and research articles which address these issues and related topics. The book is accessible to both researchers and graduate students beginning to study this subject.

This volume offers an introduction to recent developments in several active topics of research at the interface between geometry, topology and quantum field theory. These include Hopf algebras underlying renormalization schemes in quantum field theory, noncommutative geometry with applications to index theory on one hand and the study of aperiodic solids on the other, geometry and topology of low dimensional manifolds with applications to topological field theory, Chern-Simons supergravity and the anti de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence. It comprises seven lectures organized around three main topics, noncommutative geometry, topological field theory, followed by supergravity and string theory, complemented by some short communications by young participants of the school.

The present workshop is aiming at the higher achievement of the studies of current topics ranging over differential geometry, Complex analysis and mathematical physics their future developments and their numerous applications. The present volume provides useful and significant information to the specialists in differential geometry, complex analysis and mathematical physics. It will be interesting also to a much broader audience of scholars and scientists working or interested in classical and quantum mechanics, in cell membranes, integrability and soliton interactions etc. Its geometric part includes homogeneous structures on almost contact metric spaces, geometric structures in four-manifolds and almost hermitian structures, complex connections on conformal Kähler manifolds, existence of compact hypersurfaces with the second fundamental form of constant length, linear Weingarten surfaces in a hyperbolic three-space, pre-contrast functions and their geometric properties, and further, fibre bundle formulation of Lagrangian quantum field theory, curvature forms and interaction of fields concerning geometrical setting in mathematical physics. The part on integrability and vector fields is devoted to the study of multicomponent nonlinear Schrodinger (MNLS) equations which play important role for understanding hydro-dynamical processes, the phenomena of Bose-Einstein condensates, etc. The symmetries of these MNLS equations are also studied, as well as their reductions and Lie algebraic properties. The third part of these proceedings treats problems of contemporary mechanics and mathematical physics. The methods of differential geometry quite unexpectedly provide important tool for modeling and studying microinjections in cell membranes, the equilibrium.

This volume offers an introduction, in the form of four extensive lectures, to some recent developments in several active topics at the interface between geometry, topology and quantum field theory. The first lecture is by Christine Lescop on knot invariants and configuration spaces, in which a universal finite-type invariant for knots is constructed as a series of integrals over configuration spaces. This is followed by the contribution of Raimar Wulkenhaar on Euclidean quantum field theory from a statistical point of view. The author also discusses possible renormalization techniques on noncommutative spaces. The third lecture is by Anamaria Font and Stefan Theisen on string compactification with unbroken supersymmetry. The authors show that this requirement leads to internal spaces of special holonomy and describe Calabi-Yau manifolds in detail. The last lecture, by Thierry Fack, is devoted to a K-theory proof of the Atiyah-Singer index theorem and discusses some applications of K-theory to noncommutative geometry. These lectures notes, which are aimed in particular at graduate students in physics and mathematics, start with introductory material before presenting more advanced results. Each chapter is self-contained and can be read independently.

This volume reflects the growing collaboration between mathematicians and theoretical physicists to treat the foundations of quantum field theory using the mathematical tools of q-deformed algebras and noncommutative differential geometry. A particular challenge is posed by gravity, which probably necessitates extension of these methods to geometries with minimum length and therefore quantization of space. This volume builds on the lectures and talks that have been given at a recent meeting on "Quantum Field Theory and Noncommutative Geometry." A considerable effort has been invested in making the contributions accessible to a wider community of readers - so this volume will not only benefit researchers in the field but also postgraduate students and scientists from related areas wishing to become better acquainted with this field.

This volume represents the proceedings of the Noncommutative Geometry Workshop that was held as part of the thematic program on operator algebras at the Fields Institute in May 2008. Pioneered by Alain Connes starting in the late 1970s, noncommutative geometry was originally inspired by global analysis, topology, operator algebras, and quantum physics. Its main applications were to settle some long-standing conjectures, such as the Novikov conjecture and the Baum-Connes conjecture. Next came the impact of spectral geometry and the way the spectrum of a geometric operator, like the Laplacian, holds information about the geometry and topology of a manifold, as in the celebrated Weyl law. This has now been vastly generalized through Connes' notion of spectral triples. Finally, recent years have witnessed the impact of number theory, algebraic geometry and the theory of motives, and quantum field theory on noncommutative geometry. Almost all of these aspects are touched upon with new results in the papers of this volume. This book is intended for graduate students and researchers in both mathematics and theoretical physics who are interested in noncommutative geometry and its applications.