Learning Seminar on the Nekrasov Partition Function

This quarter (Winter 2015) I'm co-organising a learning seminar on the Nekrasov partition function with Philsang Yoo and Brian Williams. Our eventual goal is to understand the paper Seiberg Witten Prepotential from Instanton Counting by Nekrasov, and some aspects of its sequel Seiberg-Witten Theory and Random Partitions by Nekrasov and Okounkov. Along the way we hope to learn about the geometry of moduli spaces of instantons on a surface (for instance, how to compute its cohomology or equivariant cohomology, its natural compactifications, its relationship to Hilbert schemes), and about Seiberg-Witten theory.

We'll meet once a week on Tuesdays 2-4pm In Annenberg G31. We've prepared a rough outline on the material we plan to cover, with references, available here, and we plan on updating this with more references as we go.

Schedule and Notes

Participants