Related papers: On characteristic numbers of $24$ dimensional Stri…
The main purpose of this article is to give the integral cohomology of classical principal congruence subgroups in SL(2,Z) as well as their analogues in the third braid group with local coefficients in symmetric powers of the natural…
We prove that if an integer homology three-sphere contains an embedded incompressible torus, then its fundamental group admits irreducible SU(2)-representations. Our methods use instanton Floer homology, and in particular the surgery exact…
We provide a systematic approach to twisting differential KO-theory leading to a construction of the corresponding twisted differential Atiyah-Hirzebruch spectral sequence (AHSS). We relate and contrast the degree two and the degree one…
In hep-th/0310120, Goheer, Kleban and Susskind argued that the holographic principle is inconsistent with the existence of stable, Lorentz invariant, 1+1 dimensional compactifications. We note some difficulties with their analysis and…
It was shown by Kuznetsov that complete intersections of $n$ generic quadrics in ${\mathbb P}^{2n-1}$ are related by Homological Projective Duality to certain non-commutative (Clifford) varieties which are in some sense birational to double…
The equations of motion and the Bianchi identity of the C-field in M-theory are encoded in terms of the signature operator. We then reformulate the topological part of the action in M-theory using the signature, which leads to connections…
We study new compactifications of the SO(32) heterotic string theory on compact complex non-Kahler manifolds. These manifolds have many interesting features like fewer moduli, torsional constraints, vanishing Euler character and vanishing…
The paper computes the Witt-sheaf cohomology rings of partial flag varieties in type A in terms of the Pontryagin classes of the subquotient bundles. The proof is based on a Leray-Hirsch-type theorem for Witt-sheaf cohomology for the…
We study smooth bundles over surfaces with highly connected almost parallelizable fiber $M$ of even dimension, providing necessary conditions for a manifold to be bordant to the total space of such a bundle and showing that, in most cases,…
In this paper, we continue the analysis of heterotic string compactifications on half-flat mirror manifolds by including the 10-dimensional gauge fields. It is argued, that the heterotic Bianchi identity is solved by a variant of the…
We discuss heterotic string theories in two dimensions with gauge groups Spin(24) and Spin(8) x E_8. After compactification the theories exhibit a rich spectrum of states with both winding and momentum. At special points some of these…
Given a smooth oriented manifold $M$ with non-empty boundary, we study the Pontryagin algebra $A=H_\ast(\Omega )$ where $ \Omega $ is the space of loops in $M$ based at a distinguished point of $ \partial M$. Using the ideas of string…
Cheeger-Simons differential characters, Deligne cohomology in the smooth category, the Hopkins-Singer construction of ordinary differential cohomology and the recent Harvey-Lawson constructions are each in two distinct ways Abelian group…
This article presents families of 7-dimensional closed and simply-connected manifolds and fold maps on them such that squares of 2nd integral cohomology classes may not be divisible by 2. Fold maps are higher dimensional versions of Morse…
Taking the signature of the closure of a braid defines a map from the braid group to the integers. In 2005, Gambaudo and Ghys expressed the homomorphism defect of this map in terms of the Meyer cocycle and the Burau representation. In the…
We perform the first systematic analysis of particle spectra obtained from heterotic string compactifications on non-Abelian toroidal orbifolds. After developing a new technique to compute the particle spectrum in the case of standard…
There is a `Mathieu moonshine' relating the elliptic genus of K3 to the sporadic group M_{24}. Here, we give evidence that this moonshine extends to part of the web of dualities connecting heterotic strings compactified on K3 \times T^2 to…
Werner Meyer constructed a cocycle in $H^2(Sp(2g, \mathbb{Z}); \mathbb{Z})$ which computes the signature of a closed oriented surface bundle over a surface, with fibre a surface of genus g. By studying properties of this cocycle, he also…
We consider the moduli spaces of representations of the fundamental group of a surface of genus g greater than 2 in the Lie groups SU(2,2) and Sp(4,R). It is well known that there is a characteristic number of such a representation, whose…
We present the various constructions of new symplectic $4$-manifolds with non-negative signatures using the complex surfaces on the BMY line $c_1^2 = 9\chi_h$, the Cartwright-Steger surfaces, the quotients of Hirzebruch's certain…