23 Aug 2012; Mat-Nat Faculty (UiTø), room A228. Tuesday 14:15-16:00

Thomas Strobl (Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1)

“From two-dimensional gravity to higher gauge theories”.

I review how, starting from various models of gravity and Yang-Mills theories in two space-time dimensions, we found the Poisson sigma model and how this can be used to obtain solutions to the Euler-Lagrange equations of the initial setting. I then report on partially successful attempts to generalize the resulting picture to higher dimensions, how Yang-Mills theories in any dimension can be generalized to structural Lie algebroids and field theories with higher form degree gauge fields naturally lead to the notion of Q-bundels. Characteristic classes of the later bundles relate back to the Poisson sigma model and its higher dimensional generalization, the AKSZ sigma models.