Speaker’s webpage: https://math.cas.lehigh.edu/andrew-harder In particle physics, many quantities of interest are expressed in terms of Feynman integrals. These integrals are attached to combinatorial objects called Feynman graphs, and can be expressed as integrals over (infinite) domains inside the real plane. In examples, one often finds that Feynman integrals are equal to special values of functions that…

Fusion categories are algebraic gadgets that have seen many applications in topology and mathematical physics.  In particular, they can be used to encode topological quantum field theories in the sense of Atiyah.  Classical examples of fusion categories include C-Rep(G), the category of finite dimensional complex representations of a finite group G.  Because of their connections…

The Z-hat invariant, proposed by Gukov, Pei, Putrov, and Vafa, is a fascinating q-series invariant of three-manifolds related to various areas of mathematics and physics. We want to find a topological quantum field theory (TQFT) that computes this invariant to understand it better. This invariant cannot come from TQFT in the sense of Atiyah, as…

Variational quantum algorithms use non-convex optimization methods to find the optimal parameters for a parametrized quantum circuit in order to solve a computational problem. The choice of the circuit ansatz, which consists of parameterized gates, is crucial to the success of these algorithms. Here, we propose a gate which fully parameterizes the special unitary group…