Title: Poisson AKSZ theory, properads, and quantization
Speaker: Theo Johnson-Freyd
Speaker Info: Northwestern University
Brief Description:
Special Note:
Abstract:
In the late 1990s, Alexandrov, Kontsevich, Schwartz, and Zaboronsky introduced a very general construction of classical field theories of "topological sigma model" or "Chern--Simons" type, which is well-adapted to quantization in the Batalin--Vilkovisky formalism. I will describe a generalization, which is to the usual AKSZ construction as "Poisson" is to "symplectic". The perturbative quantization problem for such field theories includes the problem of wheel-free universal deformation quantization and the Etingof--Kazhdan quantization of Lie bialgebras; more generally, it has to do with the formality problem for the E_n operads. The technical tool needed to pose the quantum construction is the theory of properads (the classical construction corresponds to their genus-zero part, namely dioperads). This leads to a conjectured properadic description of the space of formality quasiisomorphisms for E_n.Date: Thursday, October 10, 2013