Related papers: Higher-dimensional Algebra and Topological Quantum…
The goal of this work is to describe a categorical formalism for (Extended) Topological Quantum Field Theories (TQFTs) and present them as functors from a suitable category of cobordisms with corners to a linear category, generalizing 2d…
(Talk presented at the XVth Workshop on Geometric Methods in Physics, Quantizations, Deformations and Coherent States, in Bialowieza, Poland, July 1-7, 1996.) The aim of this article is to introduce some basic notions of Topological Quantum…
It has been common wisdom among mathematicians that Extended Topological Field Theory in dimensions higher than two is naturally formulated in terms of n-categories with n> 1. Recently the physical meaning of these higher categorical…
We introduce regular stratified piecewise linear manifolds to describe lattices and investigate the lattice model approach to topological quantum field theory in all dimensions. We introduce the unitary $n+1$ alterfold TQFT and construct it…
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…
These notes offer a lightening introduction to topological quantum field theory in its functorial axiomatisation, assuming no or little prior exposure. We lay some emphasis on the connection between the path integral motivation and the…
This paper gives a definition of an extended topological quantum field theory (TQFT) as a weak 2-functor Z: nCob_2 -> 2Vect, by analogy with the description of a TQFT as a functor Z: nCob -> Vect. We also show how to obtain such a theory…
This thesis provides an introduction to the various category theory ideas employed in topological quantum field theory. These theories are viewed as symmetric monoidal functors from topological cobordism categories into the category of…
An n-category is some sort of algebraic structure consisting of objects, morphisms between objects, 2-morphisms between morphisms, and so on up to n-morphisms, together with various ways of composing them. We survey various concepts of…
Higher-dimensional category theory is the study of n-categories, operads, braided monoidal categories, and other such exotic structures. Although it can be treated purely as an algebraic subject, it is inherently topological in nature: the…
Algebraic quantum field theory provides a general, mathematically precise description of the structure of quantum field theories, and then draws out consequences of this structure by means of various mathematical tools -- the theory of…
In the present paper we propose a new approach to quantum fields in terms of category algebras and states on categories. We define quantum fields and their states as category algebras and states on causal categories with partial involution…
In this paper we propose a naive construction of 2-dimensional extended topological quantum field theories (TQFTs), which can be further generalized to the higher-dimension extended TQFTs.
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 present a precise definition of extended homotopy quantum field theories and develop an orbifold construction for these theories when the target space is the classifying space of a finite group $G$, i.e. for $G$-equivariant topological…
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,…
Mostly self-contained script on functorial topological quantum field theories. These notes give a slow introduction to the basic notions of category theory which serve a closer investigation of cobordisms and (commutative) Frobenius…
This paper develops a concept of 2-categorical algebraic quantum field theories (2AQFTs) that assign locally presentable linear categories to spacetimes. It is proven that ordinary AQFTs embed as a coreflective full 2-subcategory into the…
Quantum computers will work by evolving a high tensor power of a small (e.g. two) dimensional Hilbert space by local gates, which can be implemented by applying a local Hamiltonian H for a time t. In contrast to this quantum engineering,…
This PhD Thesis is devoted to the study of Hodge structures on a special type of complex algebraic varieties, the so-called character varieties. For this purpose, we propose to use a powerful algebro-geometric tool coming from theoretical…