Thirty-First Meeting of the North British Mathematical Physics Seminar
The thirty-first meeting of the North British Mathematical
Physics Seminar will be held on Saturday 29 October
2011 in Durham, in the Derman Christopherson Room of the
Calman Learning Centre, next to the Department of
Mathematical Sciences.
These
people have so far said they intend to come.
Programme
11:00-11:30
Coffee (in the Maths Dept, room CM211)
11:30-12:25
Anne Taormina
(Durham)
I will briefly explain why some theoretical particle
physicists and number theorists have recently become interested in
'Mathieu 24 Moonshine' and present the construction of a novel map
between lattices to achieve a description of a group larger than
the largest finite symplectic automorphisms group of K3 surfaces
by orders of magnitude. The significance of this overarching
symmetry will be stressed.
13:45-14:40
Christian Sämann
(Heriot-Watt)
I will discuss a lift of the ADHM construction of monopoles,
which can be interpreted in terms of a D1-D3-brane configuration, to a
construction of self-dual strings, which is related to an M2-M5-brane
configuration. This construction involves a loop space description of
the M5-brane theory.
14:45-15:40
Herbert Gangl
(Durham)
The analytical evaluation of Feynman integrals is a crucial
problem in particle physics. Feynman integrals can generally be
expressed in terms of (special classes of) multiple
polylogarithms. While the actual functions can become very hard
to deal with, it turns out to be more accessible to work with an
algebraic avatar of a polylogarithm, dubbed a "symbol" by
Goncharov. We will introduce polylogarithms and discuss some of
their properties, in particular how to form--and work with--their
associated symbol, and, time permitting, indicate a procedure
which sometimes allows to retrieve the function from a given
symbol (joint with C.Duhr and J.Rhodes).
16:30-16:55
Carlos Scarinci
(Nottingham)
We describe a parametrization of the phase space of 2+1 globally
hyperbolic AdS spacetimes by two copies of universal
Teichmüller space obtained from the correspondence between maximal
surfaces in AdS_3 and quasi-symmetric homeomorphisms of the circle.
This yields a natural map
generalizing the Mess map to spacetimes with noncompact spatial
topology. We also relate such parametrization to the Chern-Simons
formulation of 2+1 gravity and the holographic (Fefferman-Graham)
description.
17:00-17:25
Noel Hustler
(Edinburgh)
The bosonic field equations of type IIB supergravity are
reduced on a locally (Cartan) symmetric background and through the
complete classification of symmetric spaces, we identify all symmetric
space backgrounds of type IIB supergravity up to local isometry.
Practical Information
Train information can be obtained here.
For directions to the Department of Mathematical Sciences
click here,
here or here.
Tea, coffee and biscuits will be provided free of charge. There
might be a sandwich lunch for which participants might be charged
(depending on funding).
Limited funds are available to help with travel expenses of
participants with no other source of funding. We hope that this
will encourage postgraduate students and postdocs to attend the
meeting. Please email Patrick Dorey
in advance if you would like to apply for support and please
book early to take advantage of the cheaper fares.