Till innehåll på sidan

Jacob Muller: An introduction to the twistor correspondence

Tid: Fr 2017-11-17 kl 13.15 - 14.00

Plats: Room 306, Building 6, Kräftriket

Medverkande: Jacob Muller

Exportera till kalender

Twistor theory is a useful tool in mathematical particle physics, largely due to the way in which the complex structure of twistor space (CP^3) encodes the conformal geometry of (complex) spacetime. Massless particles can be described by homogeneous, holomorphic twistor functions, and as a result it crops up in various field theories, including conformal field theory, superstring theory, and supergravity. But I won't be talking about any of that. Instead, I will give an introduction to some elementary geometry of the twistor correspondence — how geometric objects in Minkowski spacetime correspond to geometric objects in twistor space, and in particular how light cones are encoded by so-called Robinson congruences. I will then briefly discuss twistor quantisation and how solutions to the massless free field equations (e.g. the wave equation) correspond to functions on twistor space. I will conclude by explaining how this correspondence can be exploited to explicitly solve certain classes of differential equations, with the Bessel equation as an example.