Title: Quantum Tunneling and Khovanov Homology

Time: Thursday December 8, 2011, 14:00-15:00 pm

Venue: Room 09 at Quan-Zhai ( 全斋), New location for BICMR, Peking University

Speaker: Professor Sen Hu (University of Science and Technology of China)

Abstract: A vacua in a classical mechanical system gives a perturbative vacua in its corresponding quantum mechanical system. The quantum vacua are obtained from those perturbative vacua modulo quantum tunneling. This is realized in several supersymmetric quantum systems (SQM) such as SQM on a manifold which gives analytic version of Morse theory, SQM on a loop space which gives Floer homology. The recent work of Witten applies similar principle to SYM over a four manifold with boundary which obtains Khovanov homology. We shall discuss related mathematical problems arising from those works.