Dear colleagues:

We announce the following seminar at IPMU
(the Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe).

Regards,

Satoshi Kondo (IPMU)
http://ipmu.jp/

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Speaker: Alexander Voronov (U. Minnesota)

Date: June 29, 2010, 13:15-14:45

Place: Seminar room B

Title: Higher Categories and TQFTs

Abstract: The goal of the talk is to describe categorical formalism
for higher dimensional, a.k.a. 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
open-closed TQFTs to higher dimensions. The approach is in the spirit
of monoidal categories (associators, interchangers, Mac Lane's
pentagons and hexagons), in contrast with the simplicial (weak Kan and
complete Segal) approach of Jacob Lurie's. This is a joint work with
Mark Feshbach.

Part 1: In the first part of the talk, I will present familiar
examples of TQFTs in this setup, including gauge theory, WZW, and
sigma-model.

Part 2: In the second part, I will discuss the notion of a (symmetric
monoidal) pseudo n-fold category and examples thereof: the category of
n-cobordisms with corners and the category of n-spans, which are the
source and the target categories of a general (extended) TQFT functor.
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You can check the location from
http://www.ipmu.jp/access/img/KashiwaCampusMap.png

The schedule of the seminar can be checked from
http://db.ipmu.jp/seminar/