Title: Large N Duality between 3-manifolds and Calabi-Yau 3-folds
Speaker: Professor Sergiy Koshkin
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Abstract:
In 1998 Gopakumar and Vafa conjectured that the generating function of SU(N) Chern-Simons invariants of a 3-manifold is equal (under an explicit change of variables) to the generating function of Gromov-Witten invariants on a dual Calabi-Yau 3-fold. Even though in general it is a challenge to construct the duals explicitly for the spherical quotients they are just bundles of resolved ADE singularities over CP^1. In my talk I will explain motivation for the conjecture and strategy for proving it in the case of lens spaces/resolved A_n bundles. This strategy uses combinatorial models of the theories involved, namely modular tensor categories of Reshetikhin and Turaev on the Chern-Simons side and the topological vertex on the Gromov-Witten side, so I will describe them in some detail.Date: Thursday, October 5, 2006