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Construction of Complex Chern-Simons theory

Groundbreaking research result

2016.05.11 | Christine Dilling

QGM Center leader, Professor Jørgen Ellegaard Andersen and associate Professor Rinat Kashaev from University of Geneva has provided a mathematical construction of Quantum Chern-Simons for complex gauge groups. The construction of Quantum Chern-Simons theory for compact gauge groups goes 25 years back to the famous work of Reshetikhin and Turaev, but it remained a challenge ever since for the world mathematical community to provide a construction of the corresponding theories, predicted by Witten, for the non-compact gauge groups. Recently Jørgen Ellegaard Andersen and Rinat Kashaev has posted a paper on the ArXiv, where they provide such a mathematical construction of the complex quantum Chern-Simons theory. This now allows the mathematical community to study this TQFT from a rigorous mathematical point of view and several such investigations are underway, in particular a number of projects have been initiated to this effect by QGM researchers.

Complex Quantum Chern-Simons (link to arXiv)

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