Abstract
The profound and beautiful interaction between smooth four-manifold topology and the quantum theory of fields often seems as impenetrable as it is impressive. The objective of this series of lectures is to provide a very modest introduction to this interaction by describing, in terms as elementary as possible, how Atiyah and Jeffrey [1] came to view the partition function of Witten’s first topological quantum field theory [21], which coincides with the zero-dimensional Donaldson invariant, as an “Euler characteristic” for an infinite-dimensional vector bundle.
Information
Published: 1 January 2002
First available in Project Euclid: 12 June 2015
zbMATH: 1008.57025
MathSciNet: MR1884841
Digital Object Identifier: 10.7546/giq-3-2002-105-140
Rights: Copyright © 2002 Institute of Biophysics and Biomedical Engineering, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
