Symmetries and Spinors: Interactions Between Geometry and Physics

The interplay between physics and geometry has lead to stunning advances and enriched the internal structure of each field. This is vividly exemplified in the theory of supergravity, which is a supersymmetric extension of Einstein’s relativity theory to the small scales governed by the laws of quantum physics. Sophisticated mathematics is being employed for finding solutions to the generalised Einstein equations and in return, they provide a rich source for new exotic geometries. This workshop aims to bring together leading experts in this highly active research area and furnish a fertile ground for future collaborations and for making new discoveries.

List of speakers:

Professor José Figueroa O’Farrill (University of Edinburgh) is one of the founding members and currently the head of the Mathematical Physics Group at the University of Edinburgh. His research is in the area of string theory and supersymmetry, and he is a world-leading expert on the geometry of supergravity backgrounds.

Professor Maxim Zabzine (Uppsala University) is a full professor in theoretical physics and the head of the Theoretical Physics Division at Uppsala University. His main research interests are in mathematical physics, in particular vertex algebras, application of differentialgeometry in low dimensional quantum field theories and the use of supersymmetric localisation techniques.

Dr David Baraglia (University of Adelaide) is a research associate and an ARC APD Fellow at the University of Adelaide. He is an expert on geometric aspects of string and gauge theories, including Higgs bundles, generalized complex structures and contact instantons.

Associate Professor Evgeny Buchbinder (University of Western Australia) is a research associate professor and Future Fellow at the University of Western Australia working on the mathematics of supersymmetry and string theory.

Associate Professor Vladimir Chernov (Dartmouth College) an associate professor at Dartmouth College and holder of a collaboration grant from the Simons Foundation. He has made important contributions to the proof of the Low conjecture that relates causality in spacetimes to knots in contact geometry.

Professor Michael Eastwood (Australian National University) is a professor at the ANU and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Sciences. He is one of the world’s leading experts in conformal differential geometry and his internationally acclaimed research links geometry, mathematical physics and harmonic analysis.

Professor Sergei Kuzenko (University of Western Australia) is an ARC Professorial Fellow and Winthrop Professor at the University of Western Australia, and holder of multiple ARC grants. His prolific research is centered around supersymmetry and the geometry of supergravity.

Associate Professor Paul Norbury (University of Melbourne) has been awarded several ARC grants and his research focuses on moduli spaces and their applications to physical problems, including magnetic monopoles in hyperbolic space and Einstein metrics.

Dr David Ridout (Australian National University) is an Australian Research Fellow at the ANU working on conformal field theories (CFT), which has strong interrelations with supersymmetry and string theory. He will talk about his findings on Lie superalgebras and their representations in physics.

Dr Dennis The (Australian National University) is an ARC postdoctoral fellow at the ANU. His recent work on the gap phenomenon tackles the question of what numbers can occur as dimensions of isometry groups in parabolic geometry, including conformal Riemannian and Lorentzian geometries.