Langlands Meeting on Friday, September 17, 2004
Time: 3:10pm,Place: 430 Birge Hall.
Modular Forms From Instanton Moduli Spaces
Abstract:
In [hep-th/9408074], Vafa and Witten constructed modular forms
with Fourier series coefficients that are Euler numbers of (compactified) instanton moduli spaces of certain four-manifolds.
I will review their construction and explain the physical intuition (electric/magnetic duality) behind it.
It is widely believed that electric/magnetic duality and the existence of such modular forms have a natural explanation
in six-dimensional physics.
Witten conjectured that there exists a strongly-coupled six-dimensional
quantum field theory that is responsible for these observations.
The search for this mysterious field theory is an ongoing effort in string theory.
Speaker: Ori Ganor
Topics to be covered
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Construction of Modular forms from Euler numbers of instanton moduli spaces (Vafa-Witten);
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Montonen-Olive (Electric-Magnetic) duality;
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Duistermaat-Heckman theorem;
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Partition functions of twisted Yang-Mills theories;
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Six-dimensional self-dual field theories;
References
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"A Strong Coupling Test of S-Duality,"
by C. Vafa and E. Witten,
[hep-th/9408074]
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"Global Aspects of Electric-Magnetic Duality,"
by E. Verlinde,
[hep-th/9506011]
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Please contact Ori Ganor at origa@socrates.berkeley.edu if you have any questions or comments about this website, or if you would like to volunteer to give a talk.