Simons Collaboration on Special Holonomy in Geometry, Analysis, and Physics: September 9-10, 2021

Sep 9, 2021, 8:30 AM → Sep 10, 2021, 2:00 PM America/New_York

Simons Collaboration on Special Holonomy in Geometry, Analysis, and Physics 

Simons Foundation 
Gerald D. Fischbach Auditorium, 2nd Floor 
160 Fifth Avenue at 21st Street 
New York, NY 10010 

Organizer: Robert Bryant 
The study of the geometry of higher dimensional spaces, important in many applications, both theoretical and applied, has led to an understanding of their properties in terms of *holonomy*, a way of describing global effects of curvature.  Those geometric spaces with 'special' (i.e., reduced) holonomy have come to play a fundamental role in partial differential equations, algebraic geometry, calculus of variations, topology, and theoretical physics, often revealing connections between these subjects that are yielding new insights in both mathematics and physics.   

The 2021 annual meeting of the Simons Collaboration on Special Holonomy in Geometry, Analysis, and Physics will highlight and explain the progress in the theory of spaces with special holonomy that has been made in recent years by the Collaboration, focussing on the construction of new examples; the increasing role of limiting constructions, particularly solitons and limits of Ricci-flat spaces; moduli spaces and BPS invariants; and connections with physics.  We will also describe the goals of our continuing research program as well as the challenges that lie ahead. 

Speakers: 

Mohammed Abouzaid, Columbia University   

Bobby Acharya, Kings College London & ICTP   

Mirjam Cvetic, University of Pennsylvania 
Zero modes of Higgs bundles on local Spin(7) manifolds 

Mark Haskins, Duke University 
Solitons in Bryant’s Laplacian flow 

Jason Lotay, Oxford University  
Some remarks on contact Calabi–Yau 7-manifolds 

David Morrison, UC-Santa Barbara  
Non-Perturbative heterotic duals of M-Theory on $G_2$ orbifolds) 

Thomas Walpuski, Humboldt University of Berlin 
The Gopakumar–Vafa finiteness conjecture 

Ruobing Zhang, Princeton University