Chern-Simons Gauge Theory: Ten Years After

A brief review on the progress made in the study of Chern-Simons gauge theory since its relation to knot theory was discovered ten years ago is presented. Emphasis is made on the analysis of the perturbative study of the theory and its connection to the theory of Vassiliev invariants. It is described how the study of the quantum field theory for three different gauge fixings leads to three different representations for Vassiliev invariants. Two of these gauge fixings lead to well known representations: the covariant Landau gauge corresponds to the configuration space integrals while the non-covariant light-cone gauge to the Kontsevich integral. The progress made in the analysis of the third gauge fixing, the non-covariant temporal gauge, is described in detail. In this case one obtains combinatorial expressions, instead of integral ones, for Vassiliev invariants. The approach based on this last gauge fixing seems very promising to obtain a full combinatorial formula. We collect the combinatorial expressions for all the Vassiliev invariants up to order four which have been obtained in this approach.Comment: 62 pages, 21 figures, lecture delivered at the workshop "Trends in Theoretical Physics II", Buenos Aires, November 199

Kontsevich integral for knots and Vassiliev invariants

We review quantum field theory approach to the knot theory. Using holomorphic gauge we obtain the Kontsevich integral. It is explained how to calculate Vassiliev invariants and coefficients in Kontsevich integral in a combinatorial way which can be programmed on a computer. We discuss experimental results and temporal gauge considerations which lead to representation of Vassiliev invariants in terms of arrow diagrams. Explicit examples and computational results are presented.Comment: 25 pages, 17 figure

Vassiliev invariants: a new framework for quantum gravity

We show that Vassiliev invariants of knots, appropriately generalized to the spin network context, are loop differentiable in spite of being diffeomorphism invariant. This opens the possibility of defining rigorously the constraints of quantum gravity as geometrical operators acting on the space of Vassiliev invariants of spin nets. We show how to explicitly realize the diffeomorphism constraint on this space and present proposals for the construction of Hamiltonian constraints.Comment: 15 pages, several figures included with psfi