White Noise Analysis, Quantum Field Theory, and Topology

In a recent article Turaev and Viro [TV] have constructed nontrivial “quantum” invariants of closed compact 3-manifolds M 3 in the form of state sums (called partition functions in statistical physics and vacuum functionals in quantum field theory) associated with the quantized universal enveloping algebra Uq(sl(2, C)) when q is a complex root of unity of a certain degree 2r > 4. The state sum is first defined for a given triangulation X of M and then shown to be independent of the triangulation X of M thus giving rise to a well defined invariant of M, which thus depends on q. This result may be viewed as a rigorous mathematical construction of what is called a topological quantum field theory. In fact, in the language of physicists, a triangulation corresponds to the introduction of a high-energy cut-off. Now topological quantum field theories have trivial dynamics, in other words they only deal with the vacuum sector, are scale invariant and more generally independent of any metrics. Invariance under subdivision is just the statement that the associated renormalization group transformation is trivial. This result suggests that the familiar techniques from algebraic topology should become useful to construct and discuss other topological quantum field theories. Moreover, similar combinatorial techniques could become helpful in discussing particle structures of low dimensional quantum field theories, whose vacuum sector is given in terms of a topological quantum field theory.

This graduate/research level text describes in a unified fashion the statistical mechanics of random walks, random surfaces and random higher dimensional manifolds with an emphasis on the geometrical aspects of the theory and applications to the quantisation of strings, gravity and topological field theory. With chapters on random walks, random surfaces, two- and higher dimensional quantum gravity, topological quantum field theories and Monte Carlo simulations of random geometries, the text provides a self-contained account of quantum geometry from a statistical field theory point of view. The approach uses discrete approximations and develops analytical and numerical tools. Continuum physics is recovered through scaling limits at phase transition points and the relation to conformal quantum field theories coupled to quantum gravity is described. The most important numerical work is covered, but the main aim is to develop mathematically precise results that have wide applications. Many diagrams and references are included.

We prove that the number of linearly independent Vassiliev invariants for an r-component link of order n, which derived from the HOMFLY polynomial, is greater than or equal to min{n, [(n+ r − 1)/2]}. Introduction. Let Vn denote the vector space consisting of all Vassiliev knot invariants of order less than or equal to n. There is a filtration V0 ⊂ V1 ⊂ V2 ⊂ · · · ⊂ Vn ⊂ · · · in the entire space of Vassiliev knot invariants. Each Vn is finite-dimensional. Vassiliev [V] studied for the special cases when n is small: V0 = V1, which consists of a constant map (Propositions 3 and 5), and V2/V1 is a one-dimensional vector space, whose basis is the second coefficient of the Conway polynomial. The dimensions for small n are found by using the computer by Bar-Natan and Stanford (cf. [BN; B1, p. 282 ]): For n = 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, dimVn/Vn−1 = 0, 1, 1, 3, 4, 9, 14, respectively. On the other hand, Bar-Natan (cf. [BN]) showed that the nth coefficient of the Conway polynomial is of order less than or equal to n. Birman and Lin [BL] and Gusarov [G] proved that the Jones, HOMFLY, and Kauffman polynomials of a knot can be interpreted as an infinite sequence of Vassiliev knot invariants, and as a corollary they proved that dimVn/Vn−1 ≥ 1 for every n ≥ 2 using the HOMFLY polynomial [BL, Corollary 4.2 (i)]. 1991 Mathematics Subject Classification: Primary 57M25.

It is a long-standing question to extend the definition of 3-dimensional Chern-Simons theory to one which associates values to 1-manifolds with boundary and to 0-manifolds. We provide a solution in case the gauge group is a torus. We also develop from different points of view an associated 4-dimensional invertible topological field theory which encodes the anomaly of Chern-Simons. Finite gauge groups are also revisited, and we describe a theory of path integrals as a general construction for a certain class of finite topological field theories. Topological pure gauge theories in lower dimension are presented as a warm-up.

Using torus gauge fixing, Hahn in 2008 wrote down an expression for a Chern-Simons path integral to compute the Wilson Loop observable, using the Chern-Simons action \(S_{CS}^\kappa\), \(\kappa\) is some parameter. Instead of making sense of the path integral over the space of \(\mathfrak{g}\)-valued smooth 1-forms on \(S^2 \times S^1\), we use the Segal Bargmann transform to define the path integral over \(B_i\), the space of \(\mathfrak{g}\)-valued holomorphic functions over \(\mathbb{C}^2 \times \mathbb{C}^{i-1}\). This approach was first used by us in 2011. The main tool used is Abstract Wiener measure and applying analytic continuation to the Wiener integral. Using the above approach, we will show that the Chern-Simons path integral can be written as a linear functional defined on \(C(B_1^{\times^4} \times B_2^{\times^2}, \mathbb{C})\) and this linear functional is similar to the Chern-Simons linear functional defined by us in 2011, for the Chern-Simons path integral in the case of \(\mathbb{R}^3\). We will define the Wilson Loop observable using this linear functional and explicitly compute it, and the expression is dependent on the parameter \(\kappa\). The second half of the article concentrates on taking \(\kappa\) goes to infinity for the Wilson Loop observable, to obtain link invariants. As an application, we will compute the Wilson Loop observable in the case of \(SU(N)\) and \(SO(N)\). In these cases, the Wilson Loop observable reduces to a state model. We will show that the state models satisfy a Jones type skein relation in the case of \(SU(N)\) and a Conway type skein relation in the case of \(SO(N)\). By imposing quantization condition on the charge of the link \(L\), we will show that the state models are invariant under the Reidemeister Moves and hence the Wilson Loop observables indeed define a framed link invariant. This approach follows that used in an article written by us in 2012, for the case of \(\mathbb{R}^3\).

Entanglement entropy is an important quantity in field theory, but its definition poses some challenges. The naive definition involves an extension of quantum field theory in which one assigns Hilbert spaces to spatial sub-regions. For two-dimensional topological quantum field theory we show that the appropriate extension is the open-closed topological quantum field theory of Moore and Segal. With the addition of one additional axiom characterizing the “entanglement brane” we show how entanglement calculations can be cast in this framework. We use this formalism to calculate modular Hamiltonians, entanglement entropy and negativity in two-dimensional Yang-Mills theory and relate these to singularities in the modular ow. As a byproduct we find that the negativity distinguishes between the “log dim R” edge term and the “Shannon” edge term. We comment on the possible application to understanding the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy in two-dimensional gravity.

Many polynomial invariants of knots and links, including the Jones and HOMFLY-PT polynomials, are widely used in practice but #P-hard to compute. It was shown by Makowsky in 2001 that computing the Jones polynomial is fixed-parameter tractable in the treewidth of the link diagram, but the parameterised complexity of the more powerful HOMFLY-PT polynomial remained an open problem. Here we show that computing HOMFLY-PT is fixed-parameter tractable in the treewidth, and we give the first sub-exponential time algorithm to compute it for arbitrary links.

In this book we shall review the systematic approaches and applications of a theory which investigates situations where Feynman path integrals of physical systems can be evaluated exactly leading to a complete understanding of the quantum physics. These mathematical formalisms are in large part motivated by the symmetries present in integrable systems and topological quantum field theories which make these latter examples exactly solvable problems. Besides providing conceptual understandings of the solvability features of these special classes of problems, this framework yields geometric approaches to evaluating the quantum spectrum of generic quantum mechanical and quantum field theoretical partition functions. The techniques that we shall present here in fact motivate an approach to studying generic physical problems by relating their properties to those of integrable and topological field theories. In doing so, we shall therefore also review some of the more modern quantum field theoretical and mathematical ideas which have been at the forefront of theoretical physics over the past two decades.KeywordsPartition FunctionPath IntegralEquivariant CohomologyCoadjoint OrbitSupersymmetric Quantum MechanicThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Chern-Simons models on [formula omitted], torus gauge fixing, and link invariants I

We consider certain invariants of links in 3-manifolds, obtained by a specialization of the Turaev-Viro invariants of 3-manifolds, that we call colored Turaev-Viro invariants. Their construction is based on a presentation of a pair (M, L), where M is a closed oriented 3-manifold, and is an oriented link, by a triangulation of M such that each component of L is an edge. We analyze some basic properties of these invariants, including the behavior under connected sums of pairs away and along links. These properties allow us to provide examples of links in having the same HOMFLY polynomial and the same Kauffman polynomial but distinct Turaev-Viro invariants, and similar examples for the Alexander polynomial. We also investigate the relations between the Turaev-Viro invariants of (M, L) and those of , showing that they are sometimes, but not always, determined by each other, and discuss some relations with the Witten-Reshetikhin-Turaev invariants and the Jones polynomial.

Topological quantum field theory (TQFT) is a powerful tool to describe homologies, which normally involve complexes and a variety of maps/morphisms, what makes a functional integration approach with a sum over a single kind of map seemingly problematic. In TQFT this problem is overcome by exploiting the rich set of zero modes of BRST operators, which appear sufficient to describe complexes. We explain what this approach looks like for the important class of Khovanov-Rozansky (KR) cohomologies, which categorify the observables (Wilson lines or knot polynomials) in 3D Chern-Simons theory. We develop a construction of odd differential operators, associated with all link diagrams, including tangles with open ends. These operators become nilpotent only for a diagram with no external legs, but even for open tangles one can develop a factorization formalism, which preserves Reidemeister/topological invariance—the symmetry of the problem. This technique seems much more “physical” than the conventional language of homological algebra and should have many applications to various problems beyond Chern-Simons theory. We also hope that this language will provide efficient algorithms, and finally allow one to computerize the calculation of KR cohomologies—for closed diagrams and for open tangles.

Topological quantum field theories – TQFTs – arose in physics as the baby (zero energy) sector of honest quantum field theories, which showed an unexpected dependence on the large scale topology of space-time. The zero energy part of the Hilbert space of states does not evolve in time, as by definition it is killed by the Hamiltonian; so, at first sight, its physics appears to be uninteresting. But this argument fails to consider a space-time with interesting topology.

We show that the fundamental time-reversal invariant (TRI) insulator exists in $4+1$ dimensions, where the effective-field theory is described by the $(4+1)$-dimensional Chern-Simons theory and the topological properties of the electronic structure are classified by the second Chern number. These topological properties are the natural generalizations of the time reversal-breaking quantum Hall insulator in $2+1$ dimensions. The TRI quantum spin Hall insulator in $2+1$ dimensions and the topological insulator in $3+1$ dimensions can be obtained as descendants from the fundamental TRI insulator in $4+1$ dimensions through a dimensional reduction procedure. The effective topological field theory and the ${Z}_{2}$ topological classification for the TRI insulators in $2+1$ and $3+1$ dimensions are naturally obtained from this procedure. All physically measurable topological response functions of the TRI insulators are completely described by the effective topological field theory. Our effective topological field theory predicts a number of measurable phenomena, the most striking of which is the topological magnetoelectric effect, where an electric field generates a topological contribution to the magnetization in the same direction, with a universal constant of proportionality quantized in odd multiples of the fine-structure constant $\ensuremath{\alpha}={e}^{2}∕\ensuremath{\hbar}c$. Finally, we present a general classification of all topological insulators in various dimensions and describe them in terms of a unified topological Chern-Simons field theory in phase space.

Monopoles and topological field theory

The spin network simulator model represents a bridge between (generalized) circuit schemes for standard quantum computation and approaches based on notions from Topological Quantum Field Theories (TQFT). More precisely, when working with purely discrete unitary gates, the simulator is naturally modelled as families of quantum automata which in turn represent discrete versions of topological quantum computation models. Such a quantum combinatorial scheme, which essentially encodes SU(2) Racah-Wigner algebra and its braided counterpart, is particularly suitable to address problems in topology and group theory and we discuss here a finite states-quantum automaton able to accept the language of braid group in view of applications to the problem of estimating link polynomials in Chern-Simons field theory.