Harcard

I will describe some recent joint work with Davide Gaiotto and Greg Moore, in which we explain the origin of the wall-crossing formula of Kontsevich and Soibelman, in the context of N=2 supersymmetric field theories in four dimensions. The wall-crossing formula gives a recipe for constructing the smooth hyperkahler metric on the moduli space of the field theory reduced on a circle to 3 dimensions. In certain examples this moduli space is actually a moduli space of ramified Higgs bundles, so we obtain a new description of the hyperkahler structure on that space.