8,679 research outputs found
The body in the library: adventures in realism
This essay looks at two aspects of the virtual ‘material world’ of realist fiction: objects encountered by the protagonist and the latter’s body. Taking from Sartre two angles on the realist pact by which readers agree to lend
their bodies, feelings, and experiences to the otherwise ‘languishing signs’ of the text, it goes on to examine two sets of first-person fictions published between 1902 and 1956 — first, four modernist texts in which banal objects defy and then gratify the protagonist, who ends up ready and almost able to write; and, second, three novels in which the body of the protagonist is indeterminate in its sex, gender, or sexuality. In each of these cases, how do we as readers make texts work for us as ‘an adventure of the body’
The Uncertainty of Fluxes
In the ordinary quantum Maxwell theory of a free electromagnetic field,
formulated on a curved 3-manifold, we observe that magnetic and electric fluxes
cannot be simultaneously measured. This uncertainty principle reflects torsion:
fluxes modulo torsion can be simultaneously measured. We also develop the
Hamilton theory of self-dual fields, noting that they are quantized by
Pontrjagin self-dual cohomology theories and that the quantum Hilbert space is
Z/2-graded, so typically contains both bosonic and fermionic states.
Significantly, these ideas apply to the Ramond-Ramond field in string theory,
showing that its K-theory class cannot be measured.Comment: 33 pages; minor modifications for publication in Commun. Math. Phy
Suspending Lefschetz fibrations, with an application to Local Mirror Symmetry
We consider the suspension operation on Lefschetz fibrations, which takes
p(x) to p(x)-y^2. This leaves the Fukaya category of the fibration invariant,
and changes the category of the fibre (or more precisely, the subcategory
consisting of a basis of vanishing cycles) in a specific way. As an
application, we prove part of Homological Mirror Symmetry for the total spaces
of canonical bundles over toric del Pezzo surfaces.Comment: v2: slightly expanded expositio
Quantum Interaction : the Construction of Quantum Field defined as a Bilinear Form
We construct the solution of the quantum wave equation
as a bilinear form which can
be expanded over Wick polynomials of the free -field, and where
is defined as the normal ordered product with
respect to the free -field. The constructed solution is correctly defined
as a bilinear form on , where is a
dense linear subspace in the Fock space of the free -field. On
the diagonal Wick symbol of this bilinear form
satisfies the nonlinear classical wave equation.Comment: 32 pages, LaTe
Supergeometry and Quantum Field Theory, or: What is a Classical Configuration?
We discuss of the conceptual difficulties connected with the
anticommutativity of classical fermion fields, and we argue that the "space" of
all classical configurations of a model with such fields should be described as
an infinite-dimensional supermanifold M.
We discuss the two main approaches to supermanifolds, and we examine the
reasons why many physicists tend to prefer the Rogers approach although the
Berezin-Kostant-Leites approach is the more fundamental one. We develop the
infinite-dimensional variant of the latter, and we show that the functionals on
classical configurations considered in a previous paper are nothing but
superfunctions on M. We present a programme for future mathematical work, which
applies to any classical field model with fermion fields. This programme is
(partially) implemented in successor papers.Comment: 46 pages, LateX2E+AMSLaTe
Type I D-branes in an H-flux and twisted KO-theory
Witten has argued that charges of Type I D-branes in the presence of an
H-flux, take values in twisted KO-theory. We begin with the study of real
bundle gerbes and their holonomy. We then introduce the notion of real bundle
gerbe KO-theory which we establish is a geometric realization of twisted
KO-theory. We examine the relation with twisted K-theory, the Chern character
and provide some examples. We conclude with some open problems.Comment: 23 pages, Latex2e, 2 new references adde
Vertex Operators in 2K Dimensions
A formula is proposed which expresses free fermion fields in 2K dimensions in
terms of the Cartan currents of the free fermion current algebra. This leads,
in an obvious manner, to a vertex operator construction of nonabelian free
fermion current algebras in arbitrary even dimension. It is conjectured that
these ideas may generalize to a wide class of conformal field theories.Comment: Minor change in notation. Change in references
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