Related papers: Chern-Simons Theory, Holography and Topological St…
The past year has seen enormous progress in string theory. It has become clear that all of the different string theories are different limits of a single theory. Moreover, in certain limits, one obtains a new, eleven-dimensional structure…
Realization of topological insulators (TIs) and superconductors (TSCs), such as the quantum spin Hall effect and the Z_2 topological insulator, in terms of D-branes in string theory is proposed. We establish a one-to-one correspondence…
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…
We develop techniques to compute higher loop string amplitudes for twisted $N=2$ theories with $\hat c=3$ (i.e. the critical case). An important ingredient is the discovery of an anomaly at every genus in decoupling of BRST trivial states,…
A target space string field theory formulation for open and closed B-model is provided by giving a Batalin-Vilkovisky quantization of the holomorphic Chern-Simons theory with off-shell gravity background. The target space expression for the…
We study the structure of wave functions in complex Chern-Simons theory on the complement of a hyperbolic knot, emphasizing the similarities with the topological string/spectral theory correspondence. We first conjecture a hidden…
We consider the Topological String/Spectral theory duality on toric Calabi-Yau threefolds obtained from the resolution of the cone over the $Y^{N,0}$ singularity. Assuming Kyiv formula, we demonstrate this duality in a special regime thanks…
We continue our study of the large N phase transition in q-deformed Yang-Mills theory on the sphere and its role in connecting topological strings to black hole entropy. We study in detail the chiral theory defined in terms of uncoupled…
I present a new class of topological string theories, and discuss them in two dimensions as candidates for the string description of large-$N$ QCD. The starting point is a new class of topological sigma models, whose path integral is…
In this paper, we discuss how gauging one-form symmetries in Chern-Simons theories is implemented in an A-twisted topological open string theory. For example, the contribution from a fixed H/Z bundle on a three-manifold M, arising in a BZ…
Topology has appeared in different physical contexts. The most prominent application is topologically protected edge transport in condensed matter physics. The Chern number, the topological invariant of gapped Bloch Hamiltonians, is an…
This work investigates cosmic topological defects in gauge theories, focusing on models with an $SU(N)$ gauge group coupled with a single flavor, explored through a holographic framework. At low energies, the effective theory is described…
We study the connection between topological strings and contact homology recently proposed in the context of knot invariants. In particular, we establish the proposed relation between the Gromov-Witten disk amplitudes of a Lagrangian…
Brane Tilings represent one of the largest classes of superconformal theories with known gravity duals in 3+1 and also 2+1 dimensions. They provide a useful link between a large class of quiver gauge theories and their moduli spaces, which…
If the vacuum manifold of a field theory has the appropriate topological structure, the theory admits topological structures analogous to the D-branes of string theory, in which defects of one dimension terminate on other defects of higher…
We show how the topological string partition function, which is known to capture the degeneracies of a gas of BPS spinning M2-branes in M-theory compactified to 5 dimensions, is related to a 4-dimensional D-brane system that consists of…
We study a topological field theory in four dimensions on a manifold with boundary. A bulk-boundary interaction is introduced through a novel variational principle rather than explicitly. Through this scheme we find that the boundary values…
We present a string theory that reproduces the large-$N$ expansion of two dimensional Yang-Mills gauge theory on arbitrary surfaces. First, a new class of topological sigma models is introduced, with path integrals localized to the moduli…
We describe the coupling of holomorphic Chern-Simons theory at large N with Kodaira-Spencer gravity. We explain a new anomaly cancellation mechanism at all loops in perturbation theory for open-closed topological B-model. At one loop this…
We find further evidence for the conjecture relating large N Chern-Simons theory on S^3 with topological string on the resolved conifold geometry by showing that the Wilson loop observable of a simple knot on S^3 (for any representation)…