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via Zoom Video Conferencing: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/362172385

Title and Abstract TBA

via Zoom Video Conferencing: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/779283357

Circularly polarized light (i.e. helicity) is a concept defined in terms of
plane wave expansions of solutions to Maxwell’s equations.  We wish to find  an analogous concept for classical and quantized Yang-Mills fields. Since the classical (hyperbolic) Yang-Mills equation is a non-linear equation, a gauge invariant  plane wave expansion does not exist.  We will first
show, in electromagnetism,  an equivalence between the usual plane wave characterization  of helicity and a characterization in terms of (anti-)self  duality of a gauge potential on a half space of Euclidean R^4. The transition from Minkowski space to Euclidean space is implemented by the
Maxwell-Poisson equation. We will then replace the Maxwell- Poisson equation by the Yang-Mills-Poisson equation to find a decomposition of the Yang-Mills configuration space into submanifolds arguably corresponding to positive and negative helicity. This is a report on the paper [1].
References
[1] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nuclphysb.2019.114685

via Zoom Video Conferencing:  link TBA

I will report on some recent progress on the problem of understanding the collapsing behavior of Ricci-flat Kahler metrics on Calabi-Yau manifolds that admit a fibration structure, when the volume of the fibers shrinks to zero. Based on joint works with Gross-Zhang and with Hein.

via Zoom Video Conferencing: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/977347126

Every physicist knows that the classical electromagnetism is described by Maxwell’s equations and that it is invariant under the electromagnetic duality S: (E, B) → (B, −E). However, the properties of the electromagnetic duality in the quantum theory might not be as well known to physicists in general, and in fact are not very well understood in the literature. This is particularly true when going around a nontrivial path in the spacetime results in a duality transformation. In our recent work, we uncovered a feature of the Maxwell theory and its duality symmetry in such a situation, namely that it has a quantum anomaly. We found that the anomaly of this system in a particular formulation is 56 times that of a Weyl fermion. Our result reproduces, as a special case, the known anomaly of the all-fermion electrodynamics—a version of the Maxwell theory where particles of odd (electric or magnetic) charge are fermions—discovered in the last few years.

via Zoom Video Conferencing: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/136830668

via Zoom Video Conferencing: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/972495373

The Oppenheim Conjecture, proved by Margulis, states that any irrational quadratic form, has values (at integer coordinates) that are dense on the real line. However, obtaining effective estimates for any given form is a very difficult problem. In this talk I will discuss recent results, where such effective estimates are obtained for generic forms using a combination of methods from dynamics and analytic number theory. I will also discuss some results on analogous problems for inhomogenous forms and more general higher degree polynomials.