In this talk I will give several perspectives on the role of
quasi-abelian categories in analytic geometry. In particular, I will 
explain why a certain completion of the category of Banach spaces is a
convenient setting for studying sheaves of topological vector spaces on
complex manifolds. Time permitting, I will also argue why this category
may be a good candidate for a functor of points approach to (derived)
analytic geometry.

I will collect some results about the study of topological and algebraic invariants of this moduli space by using non-abelian Hodge theory. Some keywords are: Higgs bundles, Mixed Hodge structures.

Topological Quantum Field Theories are functors from a category of bordisms of manifolds to (usually) some categorification of the notion of vector spaces. In this talk we will first discuss why mathematicians are interested in these in general and an overview of the relevant notions. After this we will have a closer look at the example of functors from the bordism category of 1-, 2- and 3-dimensional manifolds equipped with principal G-bundles, for G a finite group, to nice categorifications of vector spaces.

In this talk, I will review an inverse scattering construction of interacting integrable quantum field theories on two-dimensional Minkowski space and its ramifications. The construction starts from a given two-body S-matrix instead of a classical Lagrangean, and defines corresponding quantum field theories in a non-perturbative manner in two steps: First certain semi-local fields are constructed explicitly, and then the analysis of the local observable content is carried out with operator-algebraic methods (Tomita-Takesaki modular theory, split subfactor inclusions). I will explain how this construction solves the inverse scattering problem for a large family of interactions, and also discuss perspectives on extensions of this program to higher dimensions and/or non-integrable theories.

In this talk I will present some recent work on the amplituhedron formulation of scattering amplitudes. Very recently it has been conjectured that amplitudes in planar N=4 sYM are nothing else but the volume of a completely new mathematical object, called amplituhedron, which generalises the positive Grassmannian. After a review of the main ingredients which will be used, I will discuss some of the questions which remain open in this framework. I will then describe a new direction which promises to solve these issues and compute the volume of the amplituhedron at tree level.

 

In this talk we discuss a new second order parabolic evolution equation

for hypersurfaces in space-time initial data sets, that generalizes mean

curvature flow (MCF). In particular, the 'null mean curvature' - a

space-time extrinsic curvature quantity - replaces the usual mean

curvature in the evolution equation defining MCF.  This flow is motivated

by the study of black holes and mass/energy inequalities in general

relativity. We present a theory of weak solutions using the level-set

method and  outline a natural application of the flow as a parabolic

approach to finding outermost marginally outer trapped surfaces (MOTS),

which play the role of quasi-local black hole boundaries in general

relativity. This is joint work with Kristen Moore.