MOST06 ANU Conference: Katrin Wendland's Talk on Anomaly Cancellation

[Kea]

Conference website
http://tpsrv.anu.edu.au/Members/bouwknegt/MOST06

I'm having a great time in Canberra so far! Crisp and clear mornings, galahs galore and great talks. Today Katrin Wendland will give her first talk on anomaly cancellation. Notes for this week's stuff will probably end up on the website, so take a look.

 

[marcus]

Conference website
http://tpsrv.anu.edu.au/Members/bouwknegt/MOST06

I'm having a great time in Canberra so far! Crisp and clear mornings, galahs galore and great talks. Today Katrin Wendland will give her first talk on anomaly cancellation. Notes for this week's stuff will probably end up on the website, so take a look.

Our Party Girl

 

[francesca]

Will you have a talk?

BTW a little curiosity off topic: are you going to see the theatrical show on QED?
If yes, give me a feedback, I'm interest in comunication of science with drama...

 

[Kea]

Will you have a talk?
BTW a little curiosity off topic: are you going to see the theatrical show on QED?

Yes, I'm talking next Saturday along with all the other students. That should be interesting. And we are planning on seeing QED on Tuesday - I'm really looking forward to it - and I'll keep you posted.

Wendland has given some comprehensive but clear lectures on anomaly cancellation for type IIA and heterotic E8xE8 theories. It does involve some amazing index theory. Of course, physically everything is upside down. Conditions on Chern classes should arise naturally in our Machian picture. But I might spend a bit more time looking at the details here.

 

[Kea]

The show QED was very enjoyable, even though I knew many of the Feynman anecdotes. It was mostly a one man play, and so relied quite heavily on an excellent and enthusiastic performance by Muirhead. We were all very tired after the first day of the workshop, and pleasantly surprised to find that we didn't fall asleep during the play!

Mathai and Hannabus spoke about their study of T-duality, which was very interesting because non-associativity appears when one looks at the C* algebra picture and then one is really forced to deal with proper bicategories (weak associativity). This may be a little alarming to some String theorists, but there is no avoiding it since the sort of 6D compactifications that String theory requires are in terms of the sort of torus bundles that were being looked at here.

More workshop on today...

 

[Kea]

This conference is turning out to be very interesting! On Wednesday we heard from Brodzki on KK theory. Now this, folks, is state of the art String theory mathematics. He was very sweet and apologetic about how difficult it all was. What I wasn't expecting was to be told that D-brane charges have something to do with Poincare duality and that they had been studying this using NCG. It's just like what we're doing! Only what we're doing is a lot simpler. And lest there be any doubt, the thing that seemed to intrigue him the most was the mysterious way in which associativity could look like commutativity - which is exactly what we get when we turn the Stasheff K4 polytope into a polytope with hexagons (labelled by trees).

There was a copy of Nature (March 2006) on the coffee table containing a review by Paul Davies of a book by Ray Kurzweil entitled The singularity is near: when humans transcend biology. I was intrigued, and the guy sitting next to me happened to have a copy of the book so I took a look. Not philosophical enough for my taste, but very impressive: a vision of how our place in the cosmos is to create AI and move evolution into another phase...and how this is all going to happen in the next 50 years. Wow!

 

[Kea]

Well, MOST06 is all wrapped up. Don't forget to look at the notes available on the web.

On Wednesday we heard from Brodzki ...

Urs has picked up on the new KK theory paper by Brodzki et al:
http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/string/archives/000879.html#more

I'm back in Sydney now. Two great seminars at Macquarie tomorrow - one by Batanin and one by Neeman. A must see for anybody who's around.