The summer school "Graduate Summer School on the Mathematics and Physics of Hitchin Systems" will take place on May 27th-31st, 2019 at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics. The goal of the summer school is to promote and facilitate interdisciplinary research in this rapidly developing field within mathematics and physics. The event will bring together talented junior researchers from a diverse range of institutions and backgrounds to learn from leaders in the field. The daily schedule of the workshop will feature a series of pedagogical lectures as well as talks from leading researchers on open questions and current results. There will be four mini-courses by experts on topics close to their own research, including a mix of lectures and problem sessions. During the afternoons, there will also be advanced research talks by experts in the field, exposing young participants to the most current open questions in the area.
Hitchin systems are receiving ever increasing attention from researchers in diverse areas of mathematics and physics. This Graduate Summer School responds to the exciting developments and interest around Higgs bundles, their spectral data and the Hitchin moduli space, as well as their realizations within string theory. The scientific goal is to introduce young researchers to important fundamentals and recent developments in the field. Topics covered will include: 1) The moduli space of Higgs bundles and its branes through the Hitchin fibration and equivariant characters of coherent sheaves on the Hitchin moduli space (including links to Langlands duality) 2) Appearances of Hitchin systems within string theory (including T-brane solutions within compactications of M- and F-theory) 3) The geometry of the Hitchin moduli space, including limits and geometric structures within the Hitchin fibration, and the relation of ends of the moduli space to the algebraic study of Donaldson-Thomas invariants of Calabi-Yau threefolds. 4) Links between Hitchin and Calabi-Yau integrable systems and their role in string theory (including string dualities). The conference website is available at http://scgp.stonybrook.edu/archives/25133.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
