Unfortunately the seminar described below has been cancelled as Kai Cieliebak has broken his foot and so is unable to travel to Brussels. We hope he will be able to visit next semester.
Kai Cieliebak (Augsburg) will speak in the geometry seminar on Thursday 16 November, at 1.30pm, in the Salle de Profs(9th floor, building NO). Note the unusual day! Kai’s title is “String topology and perturbative Chern-Simons theory”. His abstract is below.One instance of Chas and Sullivan’s “string topology” is a Lie bialgebra structure on the equivariant loop space homology of a closed oriented manifold. An attempt to construct the underlying chain level structure leads to integrals over configuration spaces closely related to those in perturbative
Chern-Simons theory.After recalling the relevant theories, I will explain the difficulties with this approach due to singular integrands and hidden faces, and how they can be resolved if the manifold is odd dimensional.