Mathematics and Theoretical Physics Meetings

These meetings are designed to encourage interaction, both social and intellectual, between the mathematics divisions (pure, applied and statistics) and theoretical physics. They consist of a short (30-40 minute) and accessible talk by a member of one of the divisions followed by discussion. They occur monthly on Wednesday afternoons, 2:30-3:30 alternately in G117 and Room 514.

For confirmation please contact Jonathan Woolf on (0151) 794 4052 or Thomas Mohaupt on (0)151 795 5177.

Wednesday Oct 18th

Thomas Mohaupt - "Geometrical aspects of string theory"

Jon Woolf - "Poincare duality and singular spaces"

Wednesday Nov 15th

Radu Tatar - "Geometric transitions and field theory results"

Wednesday Dec 6th

Hugh Morton - "Some knot-theoretical constructions related to field theories"

I will draw attention to some ideas fom the physics/topology interface. These involve calculations based on geometric data and their organisation in terms of this dependence. Starting with a couple of familiar examples I will consider the different ways they may be viewed by physicists and topologists. I will then talk about Witten's TQFTs, mainly with a topologists view, to illustrate some of the recent work on these.

Wednesday Feb 7th

Alon Faraggi - "Spinor-vector duality in heterotic string models"

Free fermionic constructions of string theories in four dimensions are realisations of orbifold compactifications at special points in the moduli space. Some classes of these CFT constructions are related to singular limits of smooth manifolds. Classification of heterotic string using free fermionic techniques reveals a duality symmetry, akin to mirror symmetry, but in which the total number of spinorial + antispinorial representations is interchanged with the total number of vectorial representations.