Seminar series
Date
Mon, 03 Feb 2014
Time
15:30 -
16:30
Speaker
Bruce Bartlett
Organisation
Oxford and Stellenbosch
A "bordism representation" (*) is a representation of the abstract
structure formed by manifolds and bordisms between them, and hence of
fundamental interest in topology. I will give an overview of joint work
establishing a simple generators-and-relations presentation of the
3-dimensional oriented bordism bicategory, and also its "signature" central
extension. A representation of this bicategory corresponds in a 2-1 fashion
to a modular category, which must be anomaly-free in the oriented case. J/w
Chris Douglas, Chris Schommer-Pries, Jamie Vicary.
(*) These are also known as "topological quantum field theories".