Women at the Intersection of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics

Can the 32C-dimensional algebra RCHO offer anything new for particle physics? Indeed it can. Here we identify a sequence of complex structures within RCHO which sets in motion a cascade of breaking symmetries: Spin(10) -> Pati-Salam -> Left-Right symmetric -> Standard model + B-L (both pre- and post…

"We explain how to construct a Turaev-Viro state sum model with defect planes, defect lines and defect points. This is work in progress with John Barrett."

The concepts of quantum information theory play an important role in two seemingly distinct areas of physics: For studying the quantum properties of black holes as well as for devising quantum computing algorithms. Quantum entanglement and computational complexity may be mapped to geometric…

I will discuss some of the mathematical puzzles that arise from the causal set approach to quantum gravity. In this approach, any causal continuum spacetime is said to be emergent from an underlying ensemble of locally finite posets which represents a discretisation of the causal structure. If the…

In this talk we will introduce generalized hyperpolygons, which arise as Nakajima-type representations of a comet-shaped quiver, following recent work joint with Steven Rayan. After showing how to identify these representations with pairs of polygons, we shall associate to the data an explicit…

The physics of General Relativity is deeply intertwined with the mathematics of Lorentzian differentiable manifolds. The latter provide excellent models of spacetime across a vast range of physical scales, encoding gravitational interactions into the curvature properties of smooth metric spaces…

In this talk we will introduce categories, a notion that packages mathematical objects of any kind and provides an abstract language to study them. We will build up our way towards so-called modular tensor categories, which roughly speaking are categories with a tensor product, duals, and quite a…

"Geometrically, a gauge theory consists of a spinor bundle describing the matter fields, associated to some principal bundle whose gauge group rules the internal symmetries of the system. The gauge fields are the local expressions of a principal connection inducing a covariant derivative which…