Title:Spinors in 2023
Speaker:Jean-Pierre Bourguignon(CNRS-Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques)
Time:Friday, July14, 10:30-11:30
Location:Mingde Building, B201-1
Abstract: Spinors appeared in Mathematics in 1913. More than a century later, they are still objects that remain a bit mysterious to a number of mathematicians when their use is ubiquitous in Physics in relation with Quantum Mechanics.
After presenting the context, the lecture aims to review recent results concerning several questions in Differential Geometry to which spinors provided some important (and sometimes unexpected) clues.
Their impact comes often through the two differential operators one can define universally on spinor fields, namely the Dirac operator and the Penrose operator. A good example is provided by the concept of a Killing spinor field.