These notes are based on a course entitled ``Symplectic Geometry and Geometric Quantization'' taught by Alan Weinstein at the University of California, Berkeley (fall 1992) and at the Centre Emile Borel (spring 1994). The only prerequisite for the course needed is a knowledge of the basic notions from the theory of differentiable manifolds (differential forms, vector fields, transversality, etc.). The aim is to give students an introduction to the ideas of microlocal analysis and the related symplectic geometry, with an emphasis on the role these ideas play in formalizing the transition between the mathematics of classical dynamics (hamiltonian flows on symplectic manifolds) and quantum mechanics (unitary flows on Hilbert spaces). These notes are meant to function as a guide to the literature. The authors refer to other sources for many details that are omitted and can be bypassed on a first reading.
The goal of these notes is to provide a fast introduction to symplectic geometry for graduate students with some knowledge of differential geometry, de Rham theory and classical Lie groups. This text addresses symplectomorphisms, local forms, contact manifolds, compatible almost complex structures, Kaehler manifolds, hamiltonian mechanics, moment maps, symplectic reduction and symplectic toric manifolds. It contains guided problems, called homework, designed to complement the exposition or extend the reader's understanding. There are by now excellent references on symplectic geometry, a subset of which is in the bibliography of this book. However, the most efficient introduction to a subject is often a short elementary treatment, and these notes attempt to serve that purpose. This text provides a taste of areas of current research and will prepare the reader to explore recent papers and extensive books on symplectic geometry where the pace is much faster. For this reprint numerous corrections and clarifications have been made, and the layout has been improved.
This monograph presents various ongoing approaches to the vast topic of quantization, which is the process of forming a quantum mechanical system starting from a classical one, and discusses their numerous fruitful interactions with mathematics.The opening chapter introduces the various forms of quantization and their interactions with each other and with mathematics.A first approach to quantization, called deformation quantization, consists of viewing the Planck constant as a small parameter. This approach provides a deformation of the structure of the algebra of classical observables rather than a radical change in the nature of the observables. When symmetries come into play, deformation quantization needs to be merged with group actions, which is presented in chapter 2, by Simone Gutt.The noncommutativity arising from quantization is the main concern of noncommutative geometry. Allowing for the presence of symmetries requires working with principal fiber bundles in a non-commutative setup, where Hopf algebras appear naturally. This is the topic of chapter 3, by Christian Kassel. Nichols algebras, a special type of Hopf algebras, are the subject of chapter 4, by Nicolás Andruskiewitsch. The purely algebraic approaches given in the previous chapters do not take the geometry of space-time into account. For this purpose a special treatment using a more geometric point of view is required. An approach to field quantization on curved space-time, with applications to cosmology, is presented in chapter 5 in an account of the lectures of Abhay Ashtekar that brings a complementary point of view to non-commutativity.An alternative quantization procedure is known under the name of string theory. In chapter 6 its supersymmetric version is presented. Superstrings have drawn the attention of many mathematicians, due to its various fruitful interactions with algebraic geometry, some of which are described here. The remaining chapters discuss further topics, as the Batalin-Vilkovisky formalism and direct products of spectral triples.This volume addresses both physicists and mathematicians and serves as an introduction to ongoing research in very active areas of mathematics and physics at the border line between geometry, topology, algebra and quantum field theory.
This book is addressed to graduate students and researchers in the fields of mathematics and physics who are interested in mathematical and theoretical physics, differential geometry, mechanics, quantization theories and quantum physics, quantum groups etc., and who are familiar with differentiable and symplectic manifolds. The aim of the book is to provide the reader with a monograph that enables him to study systematically basic and advanced material on the recently developed theory of Poisson manifolds, and that also offers ready access to bibliographical references for the continuation of his study. Until now, most of this material was dispersed in research papers published in many journals and languages. The main subjects treated are the Schouten-Nijenhuis bracket; the generalized Frobenius theorem; the basics of Poisson manifolds; Poisson calculus and cohomology; quantization; Poisson morphisms and reduction; realizations of Poisson manifolds by symplectic manifolds and by symplectic groupoids and Poisson-Lie groups. The book unifies terminology and notation. It also reports on some original developments stemming from the author's work, including new results on Poisson cohomology and geometric quantization, cofoliations and biinvariant Poisson structures on Lie groups.
Kähler geometry is a beautiful and intriguing area of mathematics, of substantial research interest to both mathematicians and physicists. This self-contained graduate text provides a concise and accessible introduction to the topic. The book begins with a review of basic differential geometry, before moving on to a description of complex manifolds and holomorphic vector bundles. Kähler manifolds are discussed from the point of view of Riemannian geometry, and Hodge and Dolbeault theories are outlined, together with a simple proof of the famous Kähler identities. The final part of the text studies several aspects of compact Kähler manifolds: the Calabi conjecture, Weitzenböck techniques, Calabi–Yau manifolds, and divisors. All sections of the book end with a series of exercises and students and researchers working in the fields of algebraic and differential geometry and theoretical physics will find that the book provides them with a sound understanding of this theory.
The geometric approach to quantization was introduced by Konstant and Souriau more than 20 years ago. It has given valuable and lasting insights into the relationship between classical and quantum systems, and continues to be a popular research topic. The ideas have proved useful in pure mathematics, notably in representation theory, as well as in theoretical physics. The most recent applications have been in conformal field theory and in the Jones-Witten theory of knots. The successful original edition of this book was published in 1980. Now it has been completely revised and extensively rewritten. The presentation has been simplified and many new examples have been added. The material on field theory has been expanded.
This book takes a snapshot of the mathematical foundations of classical and quantum mechanics from a contemporary mathematical viewpoint. It covers a number of important recent developments in dynamical systems and mathematical physics and places them in the framework of the more classical approaches; the presentation is enhanced by many illustrative examples concerning topics which have been of especial interest to workers in the field, and by sketches of the proofs of the major results. The comprehensive bibliographies are designed to permit the interested reader to retrace the major stages in the development of the field if he wishes. Not so much a detailed textbook for plodding students, this volume, like the others in the series, is intended to lead researchers in other fields and advanced students quickly to an understanding of the 'state of the art' in this area of mathematics. As such it will serve both as a basic reference work on important areas of mathematical physics as they stand today, and as a good starting point for further, more detailed study for people new to this field.
This volume reflects the growing collaboration between mathematicians and theoretical physicists to treat the foundations of quantum field theory using the mathematical tools of q-deformed algebras and noncommutative differential geometry. A particular challenge is posed by gravity, which probably necessitates extension of these methods to geometries with minimum length and therefore quantization of space. This volume builds on the lectures and talks that have been given at a recent meeting on "Quantum Field Theory and Noncommutative Geometry." A considerable effort has been invested in making the contributions accessible to a wider community of readers - so this volume will not only benefit researchers in the field but also postgraduate students and scientists from related areas wishing to become better acquainted with this field.
This book is a collection of expository articles from the Center of Mathematics at Notre Dame's 2011 program on quantization. Included are lecture notes from a summer school on quantization on topics such as the Cherednik algebra, geometric quantization, detailed proofs of Willwacher's results on the Kontsevich graph complex, and group-valued moment maps. This book also includes expository articles on quantization and automorphic forms, renormalization, Berezin-Toeplitz quantization in the complex setting, and the commutation of quantization with reduction, as well as an original article on derived Poisson brackets. The primary goal of this volume is to make topics in quantization more accessible to graduate students and researchers.
