These are lecture notes for a 4h mini-course held in Toulouse, May 9-12th, at the thematic school on "Quantum topology and geometry". The goal of these lectures is to (a) explain some incarnations, in the last ten years, of the idea of topological recursion: in two dimensional quantum field theories, in cohomological field theories, in the computation of Weil-Petersson volumes of the moduli space of curves; (b) relate them more specifically to Eynard-Orantin topological recursion (revisited from Kontsevich-Soibelman point of view based on quantum Airy structures).
The paper aims at giving an introduction to the notion of quantum curves. The main purpose is to describe the new discovery of the relation between the following two disparate subjects: one is the topological recursion, that has its origin in random matrix theory and has been effectively applied to many enumerative geometry problems; and the other is the quantization of Hitchin spectral curves associated with Higgs bundles. Our emphasis is on explaining the motivation and examples. Concrete examples of the direct relation between Hitchin spectral curves and enumeration problems are given. A ge…
Lecture notes to a one-term course on operator algebras and their application in physics. Very brief and basic introduction to the subject of Banach- and C-star algebras complemented with their appearance in physics. The course is intended at mathematics students in their master program with a basic knowledge of functional analysis and some interest in the foundations of quantum mechanics.
These third-year lecture notes are designed for a 1-semester course in topological quantum field theory (TQFT). Assumed background in mathematics and physics are only standard second-year subjects: multivariable calculus, introduction to quantum mechanics and basic electromagnetism. Keywords: quantum mechanics/field theory, path integral, Hodge decomposition, Chern-Simons and Yang-Mills gauge theories, conformal field theory
These notes are dedicated to whom may be interested in algorithms, Markov chain, coupling, and graph theory etc. I present some preliminaries on coupling and explanations of the important formulas or phrases, which may be helpful for us to understand D. Weitz's paper "Combinatorial Criteria for Uniqueness of Gibbs Measures" with ease.
The goal of these lectures is to exhibit the framing anomaly in the Batalin-Vilkovisky formulation of perturbative Chern-Simons theory. Concretely, we show that the partition function fails to satisfy the Quantum Master Equation, and show that this can be remedied at the cost of introducing a framing. Along the way, we discuss principal bundles and connections, the Chern-Simons action functional, and perturbative quantization of gauge theories in the Batalin-Vilkovisky formalism.
These lecture notes concern information-theoretic notions of entropy. They are intended for, and have been successfully taught to, undergraduate students interested inresearch careers. Besides basic notions of analysis related to convergence that are typically taught in the first or second year of undergraduate studies, no other background is needed to read the notes. The notes might be also of interest to any mathematically inclined reader who wishes to learn basic facts about notions of entropy in an elementary setting.
This lecture note surveys the gamma matrices in general dimensions with arbitrary signatures, the study of which is essential to understand the supersymmetry in the corresponding spacetime. The contents supplement the lecture presented by the author at Modave Summer School in Mathematical Physics, Belgium, June, 2005.
These are the lecture notes for the introductory course on Whitehead, Reidemeister and Ray-Singer torsions, given by the author at the University of Zurich in Spring semester 2014.
These lecture notes in the De Rham-Hodge theory are designed for a 1-semester undergraduate course (in mathematics, physics, engineering, chemistry or biology). This landmark theory of the 20th Century mathematics gives a rigorous foundation to modern field and gauge theories in physics, engineering and physiology. The only necessary background for comprehensive reading of these notes is Green's theorem from multivariable calculus.
These notes are based on a lecture course by L. Chekhov held at the University of Manchester in May 2006 and February-March 2007. They are divulgative in character, and instead of containing rigorous mathematical proofs, they illustrate statements giving an intuitive insight. We intentionally remove most bibliographic references from the body of the text devoting a special section to the history of the subject at the end.
This is a graduate-level introduction to C*-algebras, Hilbert C*-modules, vector bundles, and induced representations of groups and C*-algebras, with applications to quantization theory, phase space localization, and configuration space localization. The reader is supposed to know elementary functional analysis and quantum mechanics.
The purpose of these notes, based on a course given by the second author at Les Houches summer school, is to explain the probabilistic construction of Polyakov's Liouville quantum gravity using the theory of Gaussian multiplicative chaos. In particular, these notes contain a detailed description of the so-called Liouville measures of the theory and their conjectured relation to the scaling limit of large planar maps properly embedded in the sphere. These notes are rather short and require no prior knowledge on the topic.
These notes are for the author's lectures, "Integral Reduction and Applied Algebraic Geometry Techniques" in the School and Workshop on Amplitudes in Beijing 2016. I introduce the applications of algebraic geometry methods on multi-loop scattering amplitudes, for instance, integrand reduction, residue computation in unitarity analysis and Integration-by-parts reduction. Illustrative examples and exercises are included in these notes.
These notes were compiled as lecture notes for a course developed and taught at the University of the Southern California. They should be accessible to a typical engineering graduate student with a strong background in Applied Mathematics. The main objective of these notes is to introduce a student who is familiar with concepts in linear algebra and partial differential equations to select topics in deep learning. These lecture notes exploit the strong connections between deep learning algorithms and the more conventional techniques of computational physics to achieve two goals. First, they us…
These lecture notes in Lie Groups are designed for a 1--semester third year or graduate course in mathematics, physics, engineering, chemistry or biology. This landmark theory of the 20th Century mathematics and physics gives a rigorous foundation to modern dynamics, as well as field and gauge theories in physics, engineering and biomechanics. We give both physical and medical examples of Lie groups. The only necessary background for comprehensive reading of these notes are advanced calculus and linear algebra.
In this lecture notes we present the equations and the physics involved in the dynamic of incompressible fluids. We present the mathematical techniques needed in order to prove the existence and uniqueness result for the case where we consider Burgers equation. We also explain an useful numerical method when dealing with this kind of equations. These lecture notes were written for the 2010 JAE-Intro Summer School. This Summer School was organized by ICMAT-CSIC and takes place in Madrid.
These are lecture notes for a series of lectures given at the Les Houches Summer School on Integrability in Atomic and Condensed Matter Physics, 30 July to 24 August 2018. The same series of lectures has also been given at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, October 2019. I overview in a pedagogical fashion the main aspects of the theory of generalised hydrodynamics, a hydrodynamic theory for quantum and classical many-body integrable systems. Only very basic knowledge of hydrodynamics and integrable systems is assumed.
This is the current form of lecture notes on my approach to field quantization. I explain on a simple scalar-field model the physical motivation and show some preliminary applications (field produced by a pointlike charge, the vacuum-to-vacuum loop diagram, the Casimir presure). The approach is based on an appropriate construction of a representation of harmonic-oscillator Lie algebra and a sequential definition of Dirac deltas.
The Gaussian Free Field (GFF) in the continuum appears to be the natural generalisation of Brownian motion, when one replaces time by a multidimensional continuous parameter. The goal of these lecture notes is to describe some aspects of the continuum GFF and of its discrete counterpart defined on lattices, with the aim of providing a gentle self-contained introduction to some recent developments on this topic, such as the relation between the continuum GFF, Brownian loop-soups and the Conformal Loop Ensembles CLE(4). This is an updated and expanded version of the notes written by the first au…
Traditionally, Hodge structures are associated with complex projective varieties. In my expository lectures I discussed a non-commutative generalization of Hodge structures in deformation quantization and in derived algebraic geometry.
These notes are based on the course given at the School of Geometry, University Kasdi Merbah (Ouargla) 2012. The aim of the course was the deformation quantization of Poisson Lie groups. In these notes we only review Kontsevich's formality theorem.
In these lecture notes we discuss recently conjectured instability of anti-de Sitter space, resulting in gravitational collapse of a large class of arbitrarily small initial perturbations. We uncover the technical details used in the numerical study of spherically symmetric Einstein-massless scalar field system with negative cosmological constant that led to the conjectured instability.
These lecture notes accompanied the course Time-Frequency Analysis given at the Faculty of Mathematics of the University of Vienna in the summer term 2021. The material is suitable for an advanced undergraduate course in mathematics or a mathematics class for PhD students. Besides standard linear algebra and calculus only some basics from functional analysis are needed. A course in Fourier analysis may be of advantage, but is not needed. The course contained 4 academic units per week. The appendices and Section 11 were not presented in class.
This mini-course of 20 lectures aims at highlights of spectral theory for self-adjoint partial differential operators, with a heavy emphasis on problems with discrete spectrum. Part I: Discrete Spectrum (ODE preview, Laplacian - computable spectra, Schroedinger - computable spectra, Discrete spectral theorem via sesquilinear forms, Laplace eigenfunctions, Natural boundary conditions, Magnetic Laplacian, Schroedinger in confining well, Variational characterizations, Monotonicity of eigenvalues, Weyl's asymptotic, Polya's conjecture, Reaction-diffusion stability, Thin fluid film stability) Part …
In these survey lectures, we investigate the geometric and analytic properties of transverse Dirac operators. In particular, we define a transverse Dirac operator associated to a distribution that is essentially self-adjoint (Prokhorenkov-R result). We describe the Habib-R Theorem showing that the invariance of the spectrum of a basic Dirac operator on a Riemannian foliation. The Bruening-Kamber-R theorems give Atiyah-Singer type formulas for the equivariant index of transversally elliptic operators on G-manifolds and the index of basic Dirac operators on Riemannian foliations. These notes con…
These notes grew out of a lecture course on mathematical methods of classical physics for students of mathematics and mathematical physics at the master's level. Also, physicists with a strong interest in mathematics may find this text useful as a resource complementary to existing textbooks on classical physics. Topics include Lagrangian Mechanics, Hamiltonian Mechanics, Hamilton-Jacobi Theory, as well as Classical Field Theory formulated in the language of jet bundles. The latter topic also covers important examples of field theories such as sigma models, gauge theory, and Einstein's theory …
