General Events - Department of Mathematics

Elliptic Cohomology and Conformal Field Theories

One of the main goals of contemporary quantum field theory research is to compute and understand the path integrals associated to conformal field theories. In the 1980s, Witten and some others realized that these values could be interpreted as numerical invariants called elliptic genera, cohomological objects which contain deep information about geometric structures on manifolds. In this two-part talk, I will describe the theory of elliptic genera and how the surprising relationships they encode can shed light on the underlying phenomena of conformal field theory.