Coarse Geometry of Topological Groups

This book provides a general framework for doing geometric group theory for many non-locally-compact topological transformation groups that arise in mathematical practice, including homeomorphism and diffeomorphism groups of manifolds, isometry groups of separable metric spaces and automorphism groups of countable structures. Using Roe's framework of coarse structures and spaces, the author defines a natural coarse geometric structure on all topological groups. This structure is accessible to investigation, especially in the case of Polish groups, and often has an explicit description, generalising well-known structures in familiar cases including finitely generated discrete groups, compactly generated locally compact groups and Banach spaces. In most cases, the coarse geometric structure is metrisable and may even be refined to a canonical quasimetric structure on the group. The book contains many worked examples and sufficient introductory material to be accessible to beginning graduate students. An appendix outlines several open problems in this young and rich theory.

Structure of gauge theories

Elementary interactions are formulated according to the principle of minimal interaction although paying special attention to symmetries. In fact, we aim at rewriting any field theory on the framework of Lie groups, so that, any basic and fundamental physical theory can be quantized on the grounds of a group approach to quantization. In this way, connection theory, although here presented in detail, can be replaced by “jet-gauge groups” and “jet-diffeomorphism groups.” In other words, objects like vector potentials or vierbeins can be given the character of group parameters in extended gauge groups or diffeomorphism groups. As a natural consequence of vector potentials in electroweak interactions being group variables, a typically experimental parameter like the Weinberg angle $$\vartheta _W$$ ϑ W is algebraically fixed. But more general remarkable examples of success of the present framework could be the possibility of properly quantizing massive Yang–Mills theories, on the basis of a generalized Non-Abelian Stueckelberg formalism where gauge symmetry is preserved, in contrast to the canonical quantization approach, which only provides either renormalizability or unitarity, but not both. It proves also remarkable the actual fixing of the Einstein Lagrangian in the vacuum by generalized symmetry requirements, in contrast to the standard gauge (diffeomorphism) symmetry, which only fixes the arguments of the possible Lagrangians.

Positive energy representations of Sobolev diffeomorphism groups of the circle

We show that any positive energy projective unitary representation of $$\mathrm{Diff}_+(S^1)$$ Diff + ( S 1 ) extends to a strongly continuous projective unitary representation of the fractional Sobolev diffeomorphisms $$\mathcal {D}^s(S^1)$$ D s ( S 1 ) for any real $$s>3$$ s > 3 , and in particular to $$C^k$$ C k -diffeomorphisms $$\mathrm{Diff}_+^k(S^1)$$ Diff + k ( S 1 ) with $$k\ge 4$$ k ≥ 4 . A similar result holds for the universal covering groups provided that the representation is assumed to be a direct sum of irreducibles. As an application we show that a conformal net of von Neumann algebras on $$S^1$$ S 1 is covariant with respect to $$\mathcal {D}^s(S^1)$$ D s ( S 1 ) , $$s > 3$$ s > 3 . Moreover every direct sum of irreducible representations of a conformal net is also $$\mathcal {D}^s(S^1)$$ D s ( S 1 ) -covariant.