SCGP Weekly Talk: Sergei Gukov, Caltech

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Title: The Sound of Knots and 4-manifolds
Speaker: Sergei Gukov, Caltech
Date: Tuesday, April 21, 2015
Time: 04:15pm – 05:30pm
Place: Auditorium Room 103, Simons Center

 

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Abstract: Barclay Prime is a restaurant in Philadelphia that became famous for its exquisite $100 cheesesteak. Served with a small bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne, Barclay Prime’s cheesesteak is made of sliced Kobe beef, melted Taleggio cheese, shaved truffles, sauteed foie gras, caramelized onions and heirloom shaved tomatoes on a homemade brioche roll brushed with truffle butter and squirted with homemade mustard. Yet, in essence, it still is just a sandwich. The physics of new knot and 4-manifold invariants discussed at the SCGP program “Knot homologies, BPS states, and SUSY gauge theories” involves sophisticated ingredients from string theory and M-theory. Yet, at its heart, it is just a familiar quantum mechanics that I will present to you in this talk.