Related papers: On characteristic numbers of $24$ dimensional Stri…
We investigate the moduli of genus 10 curves that are endowed with a faithful action of the icosahedral group $\mathcal{A}_5$. We show among other things that this has the structure of a Deligne-Mumford stack whose underlying coarse moduli…
This Laurea Thesis contains six introductory chapters (I-VI) on various aspects of String Theory, mostly related to String compactifications, orientifold constructions and SUSY breaking. On the other hand, the last chapter contains some new…
We set up a framework of 2-Hilbert bundles, which allows to rigorously define the "stringor bundle", a higher differential geometric object anticipated by Stolz and Teichner in an unpublished preprint about 20 years ago. Our framework…
We discuss the mathematical properties of six--dimensional non--K\"ahler manifolds which occur in the context of ${\cal N}=1$ supersymmetric heterotic and type IIA string compactifications with non--vanishing background H--field. The…
We investigate numerically the configurational statistics of strings. The algorithm models an ensemble of global $U(1)$ cosmic strings, or equivalently vortices in superfluid $^4$He. We use a new method which avoids the specification of…
Restricted Whitney numbers of the first kind appear in the combinatorial recursion for the matroid Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials. In the special case of braid matroids (the matroid associated to the partition lattice, the complete graph, the…
We analyze in detail three classes of isomondromy deformation problems associated with integrable systems. The first two are related to the scaling invariance of the $n\times n$ AKNS hierarchies and the Gel'fand-Dikii hierarchies. The third…
In this paper we study the topology of the cobordism category of open and closed strings. This is a 2-category in which the objects are compact one-manifolds whose boundary components are labeled by an indexing set (the set of "D-branes"),…
We review and present new results for a string moving on an $SU(1,1)$ group manifold. We discuss two classes of theories which use discrete representations. For these theories the representations forbidden by unitarity decouple and, in…
We discuss supersymmetry in twelve dimensions and present a covariant supersymmetric action for a brane with worldsheet signature (2,2), called a super (2+2)-brane, propagating in the osp(64,12) superspace. This superspace is explicitly…
In this paper we introduce the concept of decorated character variety for the Riemann surfaces arising in the theory of the Painlev\'e differential equations. Since all Painlev\'e differential equations (apart from the sixth one) exhibit…
We offer a new proof that two closed oriented 4-manifolds are cobordant if their signatures agree, in the spirit of Lickorish's proof that all closed oriented 3-manifolds bound 4-manifolds. Where Lickorish uses Heegaard splittings we use…
The most general gauge-invariant marginal deformation of four-dimensional abelian BF-type topological field theory is studied. It is shown that the deformed quantum field theory is topological and that its observables compute, in addition…
In this paper we define a Poincar\'e-Reidemeister scalar product on the determinant line of the cohomology of any flat vector bundle over a closed orientable odd-dimensional manifold. It is a combinatorial "torsion-type" invariant which…
We describe two major string topology operations, the Chas-Sullivan product and the Goresky-Hingston coproduct, from geometric and algebraic perspectives. The geometric construction uses Thom-Pontrjagin intersection theory while the…
We prove new Skoda-type division, or ideal membership, theorems. We work in a geometric setting of line bundles over Kahler manifolds that are Stein away from an analytic subvariety. (This includes complex projective manifolds.) Our…
We study a canonical basis for spaces of weakly holomorphic modular forms of weights 12, 16, 18, 20, 22, and 26 on the full modular group. We prove a relation between the Fourier coefficients of modular forms in this canonical basis and a…
Let G be a compact, semi-simple Lie group and H a maximal rank reductive subgroup. The irreducible representations of G can be constructed as spaces of harmonic spinors with respect to a Dirac operator on the homogeneous space G/H twisted…
We first show that for a bounded pseudoconvex domain with a manifold quotient of finite-volume in the sense of Kahler-Einstein measure, the identity component of the automorphism group of this domain is semi-simple without compact factors.…
We study in detail two row Springer fibres of even orthogonal type from an algebraic as well as topological point of view. We show that the irreducible components and their pairwise intersections are iterated P^1-bundles. Using results of…