Related papers: TQFTs do not detect the Milnor sphere
Topological quantum field theories (TQFTs) are symmetric monoidal functors out of cobordism categories. In dimension two, oriented TQFTs are famously classified by commutative Frobenius algebras. In the unoriented setting, the…
In previous work, we proposed a general framework of positive topological field theories (TFTs) based on Eilenberg's notion of summation completeness for semirings. In the present paper, we apply this framework in constructing explicitly a…
Gluing two manifolds M_1 and M_2 with a common boundary S yields a closed manifold M. Extending to formal linear combinations x=Sum_i(a_i M_i) yields a sesquilinear pairing p=<,> with values in (formal linear combinations of) closed…
We define Homotopy quantum field theories (HQFT) as Topological quantum field theories (TQFT) for manifolds endowed with extra structure in the form of a map into some background space X. We also build the category of homotopy cobordisms…
The two-category with three-manifolds as objects, h-cobordisms as morphisms, and diffeomorphisms of these as two-morphisms, is extremely rich; from the point of view of classical physics it defines a nontrivial topological model for general…
Special generic maps are higher dimensional versions of Morse functions with exactly two singular points, characterizing spheres topologically except $4$-dimensional cases: in these cases standard spheres are characterized. Canonical…
In this article we prove that any unitary, axiomatic topological quantum field theory in four-dimensions can not detect changes in the smooth structure of M, a simply connected, closed (compact without boundary), oriented smooth manifold.…
The decomposition of an arbitrary axiomatic topological quantum field theory or TQFT into indecomposable theories is given. In particular, unitary TQFT's in arbitrary dimensions are shown to decompose into a sum of theories in which the…
In this paper, we present a construction toward a new type of TQFTs at the crossroads of low-dimensional topology, algebraic geometry, physics, and homotopy theory. It assigns TMF-modules to closed 3-manifolds and maps of TMF-modules to…
We apply the idea of a topological quantum field theory (TQFT) to maps from manifolds into topological spaces. This leads to a notion of a (d+1)-dimensional homotopy quantum field theory (HQFT) which may be described as a TQFT for closed…
We construct a Topological Quantum Field Theory (in the sense of Atiyah) associated to the universal finite-type invariant of 3-dimensional manifolds, as a functor from the category of 3-dimensional manifolds with parametrized boundary,…
A 3-dimensional homotopy quantum field theory (HQFT) can be described as a TQFT for surfaces and 3-cobordisms endowed with homotopy classes of maps into a given space. For a group $\pi$, we introduce a notion of a modular crossed…
We introduce the notion of $n$-dimensional topological quantum field theory (TQFT) with defects as a symmetric monoidal functor on decorated stratified bordisms of dimension $n$. The familiar closed or open-closed TQFTs are special cases of…
We construct 3-dimensional once-Extended Topological Quantum Field Theories (ETQFTs for short) out of (possibly non-semisimple) modular categories, and we explicitly identify linear categories and functors in their image. The circle…
Quantum field theory has various projective characteristics which are captured by what are called anomalies. This paper explores this idea in the context of fully-extended three-dimensional topological quantum field theories (TQFTs). Given…
We show that various classes of closed manifolds with non-trivial higher homotopy groups do not support (transitive) Anosov diffeomorphisms. In particular we show that a finite product of spheres at least one of which is even-dimensional…
We introduce a homology theory whose Euler characteristics counts ASD bundles over four dimensional co-associative submanifolds in (almost) G_2 manifolds. As a TQFT, in relative situations, we have the Fukaya-Floer category of Lagrangians…
We analyze the spectrum of the bosonic and superstring on the orbifold of the space-time by a boost, leading to the cosmological singularity. We show that the modular invariance leads to the spectrum where the twisted sector tachyon,…
Originating from the topology of the path-integral target space $Y$, solitonic symmetry describes the conservation law of topological solitons and the selection rule of defect operators. As Ref.~\cite{Chen:2022cyw} exemplifies, the…
A faithful $(1+1)$ TQFT has recently been constructed, but the existence of a faithful $(2+1)$ TQFT remains an open question, that subsumes the hard problem of linearity of mapping class groups of surfaces. To circumvent the latter problem…