Nonlinear sigma-models in physics have been a source of interesting and important ideas in geometry, topology, and algebra. One such model is the curved beta gamma system. This purely bosonic model studies maps from a Riemann surface to a target complex manifold X. The solutions to the classical equations of motion are holomorphic maps. An extension of this model - the so-called heterotic model, incorporates fermionic fields valued in a holomorphic vector bundle E on the complex manifold. In this thesis, I study this extended model within the framework of effective field theory and BV quantization developed by Kevin Costello. Building on earlier work of Gorbounov-Gwilliam-Williams in the purely bosonic case, my approach uses tools of Gelfand-Kazhdan formal geometry and derived deformation theory to extract obstructions to quantization (anomalies) and identify these with characteristic classes of the target manifold. Specifically, I show that the obstruction to solving the Quantum Master Equation can be identified with the class ch_2 (TX)-ch_2(E), and the obstruction to the quantizing equivariantly with respect to holomorphic vector fields on the source Riemann surface can be identified with c_1 (TX) - c_1(E). By analyzing the theory where the source is an elliptic curve, an explicit geometric construction of the partition function is given.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/43183 |
| Date | 07 October 2021 |
| Creators | Ladouce, James |
| Contributors | Szczesny, Matt |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
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