EVENT DETAILS AND ABSTRACT

Title: Vertex Operators and Hilbert Schemes
Speaker: Erik Carlsson
Speaker Info: Northwestern
Brief Description:
Special Note:
Abstract:

For a long time people have recoginized that there is a (perhaps mysterious) connection between the cohomology of the Hilbert scheme of points on a surface and 2-d conformal field theory. The direct sum \bigoplus_n Hilb_n X is isomorphic to some Fock space in CFT, and the important operators on the CFT side make for valuable auxilliary gadgets on the Hilbert scheme side. I'll give a geometric construction for the "vertex operator" in CFT for any smooth surface, and show how this can be used for some simple Hilbert scheme calculations.