Related papers: Higgs bundles without geometry
These notes form part of a lecture course on gauge theory. The material covered is standard in the physics literature, but perhaps less well-known to mathematicians. The purpose of these notes is to make spontaneous symmetry breaking and…
After providing a suitable definition of numerical effectiveness for Higgs bundles, and a related notion of numerical flatness, in this paper we prove, together with some side results, that all Chern classes of a Higgs-numerically flat…
We construct five families of two-dimensional moduli spaces of parabolic Higgs bundles (respectively local systems) by taking the equivariant Hilbert scheme of a certain finite group acting on the cotangent bundle of an elliptic curve. We…
Ideas from deformation quantization applied to algebras with one generator lead to methods to treat a nonlinear flat connection. It provides us elements of algebras to be parallel sections. The moduli space of the parallel sections is…
This thesis reviews the theory of bundle gerbes and then examines the higher dimensional notion of a bundle 2-gerbe. The notion of a bundle 2-gerbe connection and 2-curving are introduced and it is shown that there is a class in…
The discovery of the Higgs boson, ten years ago, was a milestone that opened the door to the study of a new sector of fundamental physical interactions. We review the role of the Higgs field in the Standard Model of particle physics and…
The general construction of self-adjoint configuration space representations of the Heisenberg algebra over an arbitrary manifold is considered. All such inequivalent representations are parametrised in terms of the topology classes of flat…
Recently, conceptually new physics beyond the Standard Model has been proposed, where a hidden conformal sector provides ``unparticle'' which couples to the Standard Model sector through higher dimensional operators in low energy effective…
In this paper we study the relation between parabolic Higgs bundles and irreducible representations of the fundamental group of punctured Riemann surfaces established by Simpson. We generalize a result of Hitchin, identifying those…
Within the mathematical framework of Quillen, one interprets the Higgs field as part of the superconnection on a superbundle. We propose to take as superbundle the exterior algebra obtained from a Hermitian bundle with structure group U(n).…
We calculate the characteristic classes for flat SL(n,R) and Sp(2m,R)-bundles over a compact surface as functions of the spectral data in the Higgs bundle description, which consists of the points of order 2 in an abelian variety. Using…
The purpose of this paper is to extend the Donaldson-Corlette theorem to the case of vector bundles over cell complexes. We define the notion of a vector bundle and a Higgs bundle over a complex, and describe the associated Betti, de Rham…
We revisit the construction of the Hilbert space of non-relativistic particles moving in three spatial dimensions. This is given by the space of sections of a line bundle that can in general be topologically non-trivial. Such bundles are…
We develop a new geometric method of understanding principal G-Higgs bundles through their spectral data, for G a real form of a complex Lie group. In particular, we consider the case of G a split real form, as well as G = SL(2,R), U(p,p),…
We consider classical gauge theory on a principal bundle P->X in a case of spontaneous symmetry breaking characterized by the reduction of a structure group G of P->X to its closed subgroup H. This reduction is ensured by the existence of…
We introduce and systematically study an expansive class of "orbifold Higgs" theories in which the weak scale is protected by accidental symmetries arising from the orbifold reduction of continuous symmetries. The protection mechanism…
I present a concise review of the Higgs problem which plays a central role in particle physics today. The Higgs of the minimal Standard Model is so far just a conjecture that needs to be verified or discarded at the LHC. Probably the…
A number of recent works in E-print arXiv have addressed the foundation of gauge gravitation theory again. As is well known, differential geometry of fibre bundles provides the adequate mathematical formulation of classical field theory,…
Given a compact Riemann surface $X$ and a complex reductive Lie group $G$ equipped with real structures, we define antiholomorphic involutions on the moduli space of $G$-Higgs bundles over $X$. We investigate how the various components of…
The concept of gauge theories progressively emerged during the 20th century while the building of the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics. This work focusses on some aspects of gauge theories. First, a modern interpretation of Maxwell's…