AQFT Lecture Series

Speaker: John Francis (Northwestern)

Title: Integrating braided categories over 3-manifolds

Abstract: I’ll describe a form of factorization homology, which gives an invariant of framed 3-manifolds given as input a rigid braided-monoidal category with duals. More generally, the construction gives an invariant of framed n-manifolds from an E_{n-1}-monoidal category with duals. This construction relies on a form of the tangle hypothesis, that a dualizable object in an E_{n-1}-monoidal category uniquely determines a functor from the category of tangles in n-space. This is joint work with David Ayala.