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Math-Physics Joint Seminar

Monday, March 19, 2018 - 4:30pm

David Ben-Zvi

IAS and UT Austin

Location

University of Pennsylvania

DRL 4C8

Special Math-Physics Seminar - note the special time and room

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.