Douglas Lectures

Date: April 5, 2019

Time: 4:00PM - 5:00PM

Location: Blocker 220

Speaker: Vaughan Jones, Vanderbilt University

Title: Subfactors, quantum field theory, diffeomorphism groups and Thompson groups

Abstract: Doplicher Haag and Roberts showed how subfactors arise in quantum field theory. Their examples were not terribly interesting from the point of view of subfactors but that situation has dramatically reversed in the last 30 years with the consideration of low dimensional quantum field theories, especially with conformal symmetry. Indeed interesting subfactors can be constructed from Diff$(S^1)$ which appears, as a consequence of conformal symmetry, in one dimensional QFT. An attempt to construct these QFT’s directly from subfactors has given an interesting family of unitary representations of R. Thompson’s groups F and T.