Wednesday, November 18th, 2015
3:00pm - 4:00pm, in McCormack 2-205

Alfred Noël

UMass Boston

Some Geometrical Aspects of the Intriligator-Morrison-Seiberg Superpotential

Abstract: Recent joint work with Steven Glenn Jackson (UMB), Mboyo Esole (Harvard), and Ravi Jagadeesan (Harvard) has produced a theory for understanding the incidence geometry of the central hyperplane arrangement whose hyperplanes are the vanishing loci of the weights of the first and the second fundamental representations of gl(n) restricted to the dual fundamental Weyl chamber. We obtain generating functions that count flats and faces of a given dimension. This counting is interpreted in physics as the enumeration of the phases of the Coulomb and mixed Coulomb-Higgs branches of a five dimensional gauge theory with 8 supercharges in presence of hypermultiplets transforming in the fundamental and antisymmetric representation of a U(n) gauge group as described by the Intriligator-Morrison-Seiberg superpotential. I shall outline the theory.