Seminars & Colloquia Calendar
Symmetries of Hamiltonian actions of reductive groups and of supersymmetric gauge theories
David Ben-Zvi, UT Austin
Location: Serin E372
Date & time: Thursday, 01 March 2018 at 1:00PM - 2:00PM
Title: Symmetries of Hamiltonian actions of reductive groups and of supersymmetric gauge theories
Abstract: Classical and quantum Hamiltonian actions of reductive groups, respectively,
give rise to ubiquitous families of commuting flows and of commutative rings of operators. I will explain how a construction independently due to Knop and Ngô (from the proof of the Fundamental Lemma) provides a universal integration of these flows for classical systems. I will then explain, following joint work with Sam Gunningham, how to quantize this action to obtain universal symmetries of the corresponding quantum systems. The action can be understood as a symmetry in supersymmetric gauge theories which is a nonabelian generalization of the invariance of Maxwell theory under shifts of the electromagnetic potential.