String Theory Journal Club

Topological quantum field theory (TQFT) has been a fruitful source ofinteractions between physics and topology. A classical example is thethree dimensional Chern-Simons theory from the 1980's. It yieldstopological invariants of links and three manifolds. In case of thelatter invariant, it was shown more recently that the invariant admitsa decomposition into a series invariant, which is a partition functionof a 3-dimensional (supersymmetric) QFT. This series invariant waslater generalized to a series invariant of knots. This motivated anextension of the series invariant of 3-manifolds to Lie supergroups, whose underlying physical theory is the supergroup Chern-Simons theory. This result was recently generalized to knots. In this talk, we review the original series invariants and introducethe recent generalization, and explore its properties and examples.https://uw-edu-pl.zoom.us/j/96227261664?pwd=6XSohvXIkXoEalbPcswHlPh1kd2UG8.1