String Theory Journal Club

Functorial field theories, pioneered by Atiyah and Segal, are an attempt at axiomatizing certain aspects of quantum field theory. Unfortunately, their framework only takes into account non-local field theories. This defect can be fixed by considering extended functorial field theories, which are naturally expressed in the language of higher categories. After introducing basic definitions of functorial field theories, I will informally define a higher category of bordisms and give an intuition on how extended functorial field theories express locality of field theories.