Andreas Floer died on May 15, 1991 an untimely and tragic death. His visions and far-reaching contributions have significantly influenced the developments of mathematics. His main interests centered on the fields of dynamical systems, symplectic geometry, Yang-Mills theory and low dimensional topology. Motivated by the global existence problem of periodic solutions for Hamiltonian systems and starting from ideas of Conley, Gromov and Witten, he developed his Floer homology, providing new, powerful methods which can be applied to problems inaccessible only a few years ago. This volume opens with a short biography and three hitherto unpublished papers of Andreas Floer. It then presents a collection of invited contributions, and survey articles as well as research papers on his fields of interest, bearing testimony of the high esteem and appreciation this brilliant mathematician enjoyed among his colleagues. Authors include: A. Floer, V.I. Arnold, M. Atiyah, M. Audin, D.M. Austin, S.M. Bates, P.J. Braam, M. Chaperon, R.L. Cohen, G. Dell' Antonio, S.K. Donaldson, B. D'Onofrio, I. Ekeland, Y. Eliashberg, K.D. Ernst, R. Finthushel, A.B. Givental, H. Hofer, J.D.S. Jones, I. McAllister, D. McDuff, Y.-G. Oh, L. Polterovich, D.A. Salamon, G.B. Segal, R. Stern, C.H. Taubes, C. Viterbo, A. Weinstein, E. Witten, E. Zehnder.

In 1989, Edward Witten discovered a deep relationship between quantum field theory and knot theory, and this beautiful discovery created a new field of research called Chern-Simons theory. This field has the remarkable feature of intertwining a large number of diverse branches of research in mathematics and physics, among them low-dimensional topology, differential geometry, quantum algebra, functional and stochastic analysis, quantum gravity, and string theory. The 20-year anniversary of Witten's discovery provided an opportunity to bring together researchers working in Chern-Simons theory for a meeting, and the resulting conference, which took place during the summer of 2009 at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, included many of the leading experts in the field. This volume documents the activities of the conference and presents several original research articles, including another monumental paper by Witten that is sure to stimulate further activity in this and related fields. This collection will provide an excellent overview of the current research directions and recent progress in Chern-Simons gauge theory.

This monograph is based on lectures on topological quantum field theory given in 1989 at Princeton University by E. Witten, in which he unified several important mathematical works in terms of the Donaldson polynomial, Gromov/Floer homology, and Jones polynomials. Witten explained his three-dimensional construction of Jones polynomials, "an elegant construction of a new polynomial invariant in three-dimensional space" (per the author), via quantization of Chern-Simons gauge theory. Hu (Princeton U.) adds missing details and some new developments in the field. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR.

This book provides an introduction to some of the most recent developments in string theory, and in particular to their mathematical implications and their impact in knot theory and algebraic geometry.

'The authors provide an up-to-date, well-organised background and essential elements of supergravity notions as well as all relevant aspects of Chern-Simons forms in gravitation. The book is a self-contained, informative, and much-needed broad introduction into the latest quantum gravity concepts, with a main focus on Chern-Simons gravity and supersymmetry … The book represents a comprehensive and systematic pedagogical exposition on gravitational Chern-Simons (Super)gravity theories, their applications, together with a selection of related recent developments in the field.'Contemporary PhysicsThis book grew out of a set of lecture notes on gravitational Chern-Simons (CS) theories developed over the past decade for several schools and different audiences including graduate students and researchers.CS theories are gauge-invariant theories that can include gravity consistently. They are only defined in odd dimensions and represent a very special class of theories in the Lovelock family. Lovelock gravitation theories are the natural extensions of General Relativity for dimensions greater than four that yield second-order field equations for the metric. These theories also admit local supersymmetric extensions where supersymmetry is an off-shell symmetry of the action, as in a standard gauge theory.Apart from the arguments of mathematical elegance and beauty, the gravitational CS actions are exceptionally endowed with physical attributes that suggest the viability of a quantum interpretation. CS theories are gauge-invariant, scale-invariant and background independent; they have no dimensional coupling constants. All constants in the Lagrangian are fixed rational coefficients that cannot be adjusted without destroying gauge invariance. This exceptional status of CS systems makes them classically interesting to study, and quantum mechanically intriguing and promising.

Developed from a first-year graduate course in algebraic topology, this text is an informal introduction to some of the main ideas of contemporary homotopy and cohomology theory. The materials are structured around four core areas: de Rham theory, the Cech-de Rham complex, spectral sequences, and characteristic classes. By using the de Rham theory of differential forms as a prototype of cohomology, the machineries of algebraic topology are made easier to assimilate. With its stress on concreteness, motivation, and readability, this book is equally suitable for self-study and as a one-semester course in topology.

This monograph discusses specific examples of selfdual gauge field structures, including the Chern–Simons model, the abelian–Higgs model, and Yang–Mills gauge field theory. The author builds a foundation for gauge theory and selfdual vortices by introducing the basic mathematical language of gauge theory and formulating examples of Chern–Simons–Higgs theories (in both abelian and non-abelian settings). Thereafter, the Electroweak theory and self-gravitating Electroweak strings are examined. The final chapters treat elliptic problems involving Chern–Simmons models, concentration-compactness principles, and Maxwell–Chern–Simons vortices.

Some of the most effective gauges in field theory are noncovariant gauges of the axial kind, such as the light-cone gauge and the temporal gauge. The principal advantage of these gauges stems from the decoupling of the fictitious particles in the theory. The purpose of this volume is to give a clear and readable account of the basic features and mathematical subtleties of these ghost-free gauges, and of their truly enormous range of applicability.In addition to explicit one-loop computations in Yang-Mills and Chern-Simons theory, the book contains detailed analysis of the unifield-gauge formalism and of the renormalization of Yang-Mills theory in the presence of nonlocal terms.

This book gives an exposition of the relations among the following three topics: monoidal tensor categories (such as a category of representations of a quantum group), 3-dimensional topological quantum field theory, and 2-dimensional modular functors (which naturally arise in 2-dimensional conformal field theory). The following examples are discussed in detail: the category of representations of a quantum group at a root of unity and the Wess-Zumino-Witten modular functor. The idea that these topics are related first appeared in the physics literature in the study of quantum field theory. Pioneering works of Witten and Moore-Seiberg triggered an avalanche of papers, both physical and mathematical, exploring various aspects of these relations. Upon preparing to lecture on the topic at MIT, however, the authors discovered that the existing literature was difficult and that there were gaps to fill. The text is wholly expository and finely succinct. It gathers results, fills existing gaps, and simplifies some proofs. The book makes an important addition to the existing literature on the topic. It would be suitable as a course text at the advanced-graduate level.

This book provides a comprehensive, pedagogical introduction to scattering amplitudes in gauge theory and gravity for graduate students.