Piotr Sulkowski

Title: Chern-Simons theory, string dualities and quantum geometry [pdf]
Abstract: Chern-Simons theory, after embedding in string theory and taking advantage of various dualities, can be related to many other physical systems (such as supersymmetric gauge theories, BPS counting, etc.) and fields of mathematics (knot theory, low-dimensional topology, Gromov-Witten theory, etc.). I will discuss two examples of such relations, involving quantization of two-dimensional surfaces and the counting of BPS states in M-theory, and present how a combination of these two lines of research leads to surprising statements in number theory.