University of Toronto's Symplectic Geometry Seminar



March 6, 2006, 2:10pm
Bahen 6183



Matthew Szczesny

Boston University

The chiral de Rham complex, orbifolds, and supersymmetry




Abstract:

I will discuss an extension of Malikov, Schechtman, and Vaintrob's construction of the chiral de Rham complex (CDR) to orbifolds, and its relation with "stringy" orbifold invariants such as orbifold cohomology and elliptic genera. I will also discuss how metrics with special holonomy give rise to extra supersymmetries in the CDR.