Learning Seminar on the Nekrasov Partition Function

This quarter (Winter 2015) I'm co-organising a learning seminar on the Nekrasov partition function with Philsang Yoo and Brian Williams. Our eventual goal is to understand the paper Seiberg Witten Prepotential from Instanton Counting by Nekrasov, and some aspects of its sequel Seiberg-Witten Theory and Random Partitions by Nekrasov and Okounkov. Along the way we hope to learn about the geometry of moduli spaces of instantons on a surface (for instance, how to compute its cohomology or equivariant cohomology, its natural compactifications, its relationship to Hilbert schemes), and about Seiberg-Witten theory.

We'll meet once a week on Tuesdays 2-4pm In Annenberg G31. We've prepared a rough outline on the material we plan to cover, with references, available here, and we plan on updating this with more references as we go.

Schedule and Notes

January 13th: Outline, and Introduction to N=2 Gauge Theories (Chris) Notes
January 20th: No Meeting
January 27th: Meeting in Tech M349 Classical Seiberg-Witten Theory (Brian)
February 3rd: Equivariant Localization (Peng)
February 10th: Moduli of Instantons and the ADHM Construction (Sean) Notes
February 12th: 2 to 4pm In University Hall 218 Compactifications of Instanton Moduli Space (Matthew) Notes
February 17th: Meeting in Tech M349 Twisting N=2 Theories (Brian)
February 24th: Seiberg-Witten Curves (Phil)
March 3rd: No Meeting
March 10th: The Nekrasov Partition Function and the Ω-Deformation (Chris) Notes

Participants

Chris Elliott, Aron Heleodoro, Theo Johnson-Freyd, Matthew Mahowald, Sean Pohorence, Josh Shadlen, Rebecca Wei, Brian Williams, Phil-Sang Yoo, Peng Zhou