Langlands Meeting on Friday, October 1, 2004
Time: 3:10pm,Place: 430 Birge Hall.
Modular Forms From Instanton Moduli Spaces - II
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
-
Construction of Modular forms from Euler numbers of instanton moduli spaces (Vafa-Witten);
-
Montonen-Olive (Electric-Magnetic) duality;
-
Duistermaat-Heckman theorem;
-
Partition functions of twisted Yang-Mills theories;
-
Six-dimensional self-dual field theories;
References
-
"A Strong Coupling Test of S-Duality,"
by C. Vafa and E. Witten,
[hep-th/9408074]
-
"Global Aspects of Electric-Magnetic Duality,"
by E. Verlinde,
[hep-th/9506011]
-
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.