INTRODUCTION TO BRAIDED QUANTUM FIELD THEORY

Indications from various areas of physics point to the possibility that space-time at small scales might not have the structure of a manifold. Noncommutative geometry provides an attractive framework for a perhaps more accurate description of nature. It encompasses the generalisation of spaces to noncommutative spaces and of symmetry groups to quantum groups. This motivates efforts to extend quantum field theory to noncommutative spaces and quantum group symmetries. One also expects that divergences of conventional theories might be regularised in this way.