Moduli Spaces of Pseudo-holomorphic curves and their applications to Symplectic Topology

Organized by Kenji Fukaya, Dusa McDuff, and John Morgan January 2 – June 30, 2014 Gromov-Witten theory, Lagrangian-Floer homology and symplectic field theory arise from the notion of pseudo-holomorphic curves, possibly with boundary conditions, in symplectic manifolds. All these theories rely in a fundamental way on Gromov’s compactness result for moduli spaces of pseudo-holomorphic curves, … Read more

Quantum Anomalies, Topology, and Hydrodynamics

Quantum Anomalies, Topology, and Hydrodynamics Organized by Alexander Abanov, Dmitri Kharzeev, Boris Khesin, Dam Son, and Paul Wiegmann February 17-June 13, 2014 Recent developments in relativistic hydrodynamics place it at the crossroads of nuclear physics, condensed matter physics and string theory. Hydrodynamics is known to be very effective in describing the long-wavelength behavior of many … Read more

Quiver Varieties

  Organized by  Ljudmila Kamenova, Alexander Kirillov, Jr., Nikita Nekrasov, and Olivier Schiffmann September 30 – November 8, 2013 Quivers and quiver varieties, introduced and studied in a series of papers of Nakajima, Lusztig, Ringel and others in 1990s, have since appeared in many areas of mathematics and mathematical physics, from gauge theory, string theory, … Read more

Physics and Mathematics of Scattering Amplitudes

  Physics and Mathematics of Scattering Amplitudes Organized by Zvi Bern, Lance Dixon, Michael Douglas, Alexander Goncharov, and Lionel Mason Fall 2013 Starting date: August 26, 2013 The study of scattering amplitudes in relativistic quantum field theory has undergone a remarkable renaissance and transformation in recent years, with the advent of new perturbative approaches such … Read more

Mock Modular Forms, Moonshine, and String Theory

Mock Modular Forms, Moonshine, and String Theory Organized by Miranda Cheng, Matthias Gaberdiel, and Terry Gannon August 26 – September 27, 2013 Modular functions, Jacobi forms and mock modular forms appear naturally in various contexts in string theory and conformal field theory. In particular, characters of conformal field theories (CFTs) define (vector-valued) modular functions, while … Read more

Topological Phases of Matter

Topological Phases of Matter Organized by Nick Read, Paul Fendley, Andreas Ludwig, Xiao-Liang Qi, Steven Simon, and Zhenghan Wang April 1, 2013 – June 30, 2013 The subject of Topological Phases of Matter has been building over a number of years, and is currently very active. The field includes many diverse experimental aspects, but this … Read more

Conformal Geometry

Conformal Geometry Organized by Ilia Binder, John Cardy, Andrei Okounkov, and Paul Wiegmann January 7 – May 3, 2013 The Simons Center will host a program on `Conformal Geometry’ for the Spring semester of 2013. This will cover subjects representing some of the most successful examples of the cross-fertilization between mathematics and physics in this … Read more

Integrability in Modern Theoretical and Mathematical Physics

  Organized by Nikita Nekrasov and Samson Shatasvili Fall 2012 Exactly solvable quantum many body systems, lattice models of statistical physics and integrable 1+1 dimensional quantum field theories have very rich and long history which substantially influenced the development of the mathematical physics in the 20th century. During the recent years it has become clear … Read more

Symplectic and Contact Geometry and Connections to Low-Dimensional Topology

Organized by Peter Ozsváth and Yakov Eliashberg Fall 2012 and Spring 2013 In the last 2 decades, and especially in recent years there were symplectic geometric ideas and methods brought significant progress in low-dimensional topology, while the methods developed in 3- and 4-dimensional topology found applications to symplectic geometric problems. For instance, the Lagrangian intersection … Read more

Simons Center Program on Algebraic Topology with Applications to Physics

Simons Center Program on Algebraic Topology with Applications to Physics Spring 2012 During the Spring of 2012, the Simons Center will have a program in various aspects of algebraic topology with applications to physics. The program is organized by Dan Freed and Greg Moore, who will make regular week-long visits to the Center during the … Read more