An Introduction to topological field theories
About: This article is published in Rivista Del Nuovo Cimento.The article was published on 1993-04-01. It has received None citations till now.
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TL;DR: In this paper, it was shown that 2+1 dimensional quantum Yang-Mills theory with an action consisting purely of the Chern-Simons term is exactly soluble and gave a natural framework for understanding the Jones polynomial of knot theory in three dimensional terms.
Abstract: It is shown that 2+1 dimensional quantum Yang-Mills theory, with an action consisting purely of the Chern-Simons term, is exactly soluble and gives a natural framework for understanding the Jones polynomial of knot theory in three dimensional terms. In this version, the Jones polynomial can be generalized fromS
3 to arbitrary three manifolds, giving invariants of three manifolds that are computable from a surgery presentation. These results shed a surprising new light on conformal field theory in 1+1 dimensions.
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TL;DR: A twisted version of four dimensional supersymmetric gauge theory is formulated in this paper, which refines a nonrelativistic treatment by Atiyah and appears to underlie many recent developments in topology of low dimensional manifolds; the Donaldson polynomial invariants of four manifolds and the Floer groups of three manifolds appear naturally.
Abstract: A twisted version of four dimensional supersymmetric gauge theory is formulated. The model, which refines a nonrelativistic treatment by Atiyah, appears to underlie many recent developments in topology of low dimensional manifolds; the Donaldson polynomial invariants of four manifolds and the Floer groups of three manifolds appear naturally. The model may also be interesting from a physical viewpoint; it is in a sense a generally covariant quantum field theory, albeit one in which general covariance is unbroken, there are no gravitons, and the only excitations are topological.
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TL;DR: In this article, a general gauge theory in the lagrangian approach is accomplished in closed form, and a new class of diagrams is revealed, required by BRS-symmetry but completely definable only from the requirement of unitarity.
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TL;DR: In this article, the spectrum of anomalous dimensions in 2D quantum gravity has been investigated and a formulae for the spectrum has been found for 2D-quantum gravity.
Abstract: We resolve renormalization problems, indicated in Ref. 1 and find explicit formulae for the spectrum of anomalous dimensions in 2d—quantum gravity. Comparison with combinatorial approximation of random surfaces and its numerical analyses shows complete agreement with all known facts.
1,266 citations