General Covariance with Stacks

Abstract: General covariance is a crucial notion in the study of field theories on curved spacetimes. In our context, a generally covariant field theory is one whose dependence on a Riemannian (or Lorentzian) metric is equivariant with respect to the diffeomorphism group of the underlying manifold/spacetime. In this talk, we will make these notions precise by using stacks and the Batalin-Vilkovisky formalism, and will moreover recover the associated equivariant classical observables in the perturbative case.

mathematical physicsalgebraic geometrydifferential geometrygeometric topologyoperator algebrasrepresentation theorysymplectic geometry

Audience: researchers in the topic

Geometry, Physics, and Representation Theory Seminar

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