In recent years, mirror symmetry for open strings has exhibited some new connections between symplectic and enumerative geometry (A-model) and complex algebraic geometry (B-model) that in a sense lie between classical and homological mirror symmetry. I review the rôle played in this story by matrix factorizations and the Calabi-Yau/Landau-Ginzburg correspondence.
In some other context, the question was raised how many nearly Kähler structures exist on the sphere equipped with the standard Riemannian metric. In this short note, we prove that, up to isometry, there exists only one. This is a consequence of the description of the eigenspace to the eigenvalue of the Laplacian acting on -forms. A similar result concerning nearly parallel -structures on the round sphere holds, too. An alternative proof by Riemannian Killing spinors is also indicated.
Let be a 1-connected closed manifold of dimension and be the space of free loops on . M.Chas and D.Sullivan defined a structure of BV-algebra on the singular homology of , . When the ring of coefficients is a field of characteristic zero, we prove that there exists a BV-algebra structure on the Hochschild cohomology which extends the canonical structure of Gerstenhaber algebra. We construct then an isomorphism of BV-algebras between and the shifted homology . We also prove that the...
We use the computational power of rational homotopy theory to provide an explicit cochain model for the loop product and the string bracket of a simply connected closed manifold . We prove that the loop homology of is isomorphic to the Hochschild cohomology of the cochain algebra with coefficients in . Some explicit computations of the loop product and the string bracket are given.
The article reviews attempts to formulate the theory of gauge fields in terms of a string theory.
Dirac-harmonic maps are a mathematical version (with commuting variables only) of the solutions of the field equations of the non-linear supersymmetric sigma model of quantum field theory. We explain this structure, including the appropriate boundary conditions, in a geometric framework. The main results of our paper are concerned with the analytic regularity theory of such Dirac-harmonic maps. We study Dirac-harmonic maps from a Riemannian surface to an arbitrary compact Riemannian manifold. We...