Seminars in Non-Commutative Geometry

Rita Fioresi: Quantum principal bundles on quantum projective varieties

In non-commutative geometry, a quantum principal bundle over an affine base is recovered through a deformation of the algebra of its global sections: the property of being a principal bundle is encoded by the notion of Hopf-Galois extension, while the local triviality is expressed by the cleft property. We examine the case of a projective base X in the special case X = G/P, where G is a complex semisimple group and P is a parabolic subgroup. The quantization of G will then be interpreted as the quantum principal bundle on the quantum base space X, obtained via a quantum section.

Francesco Genovese: Deforming t-structures

A guiding principle of non-commutative algebraic geometry is that geometric objects (i.e. rings and schemes) are replaced by categories of modules/sheaves thereof. In order to keep track of the homological information, we actually take derived categories of such modules/sheaves. From this point of view, we are now interested in understanding typical geometric concepts directly in this categorical framework. A key example is given by deformations. In this talk, I will report on joint work with W. Lowen and M. Van den Bergh, where we attempt to define and study deformations categorically, in the framework of (enhanced) triangulated categories with a t-structure. This will also shed light on Hochschild cohomology.

Maxime Fairon: Around Van den Bergh’s double brackets

The notion of a double Poisson bracket on an associative algebra was introduced by M. Van den Bergh in order to induce a (usual) Poisson bracket on the representation spaces of this algebra. I will start by reviewing the basics of this theory and its relation to other interesting operations, such as Leibniz brackets and H0-Poisson structures. I will then explain some recent results and generalisations related to double Poisson brackets.

Camille Male: Freeness over the diagonal and the global fluctuations of Wigner matrices

We characterize the limiting second order distributions of independent complex Wigner and deterministic matrices using Voiculescu’s notions of freeness over the diagonal. For unitary invariant random matrices, Mingo and Speicher’s notion of second-order freeness gives a universal rule to compute the global fluctuation. But this one is in general not valid for non-Gaussian Wigner matrices, since the fluctuations are not universal, depending in particular on the moment of order 4 of the matrices. Yet, it is possible to adapt Mingo-Speicher’s formulation and reformulate this notion for operator-valued random variables in a second-order probability space, and prove a universal rule for more general Wigner matrices (for which the marginal second-order distributions are not universal).

Lisa Glaser: A picture of a spectral triple

A compact manifold can be described through a spectral triple, consisting of a Hilbert space H, an algebra of functions A and a Dirac operator D. But what if we are given a spectral triple? Then the situation is more complicated, it is not clear how to reconstruct geometry from a spectral triple, in particular one with a non-commutative algebra A, or a finite Hilbert space H. But these are questions one would like to ask if trying to use spectral triples to possibly quantize gravity. In this talk I will show how we recover metric information from a truncation of a spectral triple to make an image, and show some odd shrinking spectral triples.

Roberta Iseppi: The BV-BRST cohomology for U(n)-gauge theories induced by finite spectral triples

The Batalin–Vilkovisky (BV) formalism provides a cohomological approach for the study of gauge symmetries: given a gauge theory, by introducing extra (non-existing) fields, we can associate to it two cohomology complexes, the BV and the BRST complex. The relevance of these complexes lies in the fact that their cohomology groups capture interesting physical information on the initial theory. In this talk we describe how both these complexes can be seen as Hochschild complexes of a graded algebra B over a bimodule M. By focusing on U(n)-gauge theories induced by a finite spectral triple on Mn(ℂ), we explain how the pair (B,M) is naturally encoded, respectively, in the BV spectral triple associated to the theory for the BV complex and in its gauge - fixed version for the BRST one. This result further reinforces the idea that the BV construction naturally inserts in the framework provided by non-commutative geometry.

Sergey Shadrin: Arnold’s trinity of algebraic 2d gravitation theories

“Arnold’s trinities” refers to a metamathematical observation of Vladimir Arnold that many interesting mathematical concepts and theories occur in triples, with some hidden influence of ℝ/ℂ/ℍ hidden in the background. By algebraic 2d gravitation theory I mean a very rich system of interrelated algebraic structures surrounding the concept of cohomological field theory in genus 0. It appears that there is an Arnold trinity of algebraic 2d gravitation theories (and one of them is a very natural non-commutative version of a CohFT), and I’ll try to expose them, with a special focus on new homotopy quotients statements that we discovered last year.