Seminars on T-duality by Schick and Severa on 5 Dec

[Jacopo Stoppa]

On Thursday, 5 December IGAP will host two seminars on T-duality. These will take place in IGAP room 205.

14:00 - 15:30 Pavol Severa (Geneva)
16:00 17:00 Thomas Schick (Göttingen)

Title (Severa): Poisson-Lie T-duality and Generalized Ricci flow
Abstract: Poisson-Lie T-duality is a curious equivalence of various 2-dimensional variational problems, which generalizes the more widely-known T-duality. I will talk about its relation to generalized geometry (i.e. Courant algebroids) and about the related generalization of the Ricci flow.

Title (Schick): Equivariant T-duality
Abstract: T-duality is a a concept inspired by certain aspects of string theory (the T stand for ``target space''). The physics predicts that one can pass from a torus bundle over a base space,  equipped with some background B-field to a ``dual'' torus bundle with dual background B-field without changing the physical content of the theory. Strominger-Yau-Zaslow even propose that
 mirror symmetry is a special case of T-duality.

To understand the mathematical underpinnings of this duality, the concept of topological T-duality has been introduced. We present the fundamental ideas of this concept: what are the objects we put in duality? what is the precise meaning of ``being dual''? Among the most striking mathematical consequences, we present the T-duality isomorphism between twisted K-theory of the two dual spaces. The last part of the talk will present new developments which concern the investigation of additional symmetries, encoded in the action of a compact group G. We discuss the meaning of ``equivariant T-duality'' and we show that one obtains a T-duality isomorphism in the full Atiyah-Segal equivariant K-theory.


Best,
Jacopo