These workshops focus on the intersection between physics and mathematics, particularly in the context of string theory, and are made possible by the generous support of the Simons Foundation. The emphasis of this Simons Workshop will be "Superstrings and Topological Strings".
Topological strings have played a key role in many recent developments in string theory. This workshop will review the important progress in achieving a deeper understanding of topological strings of the past few years, and attempt to expand upon it. All areas of mathematics or physics that relate to the broad theme of topological aspects of string theory are of interest, and researchers in such areas will be welcome.
The first workshop was held last summer at Stony Brook, and was extremely fruitful for the participants; major results that came out of the workshop, have appeared in, among others, hep-th/0308117, 0309015, 0309208, 0309220, 0310061, 0310118, 0310153, 0310157, 0310272, 0311002, 0311024, 0311155, 0311181, 0312022, 0401100, 0402132, 0403035, 0403129.
The second workshop of this series will be held July 26 - August 27 at Stony Brook University. Cumrun Vafa of Harvard will again be in residence at Stony Brook for the duration of the workshop, and will serve as Scientific Adivsor.
The Simons Workshops are intended to provide an informal yet vital atmosphere, in which a core of leading researchers interact together and with promising junior physicists and mathematicians. There will be a light load of talks with typically one pedagogical and one research talk per day.
We invite applications from researchers working in areas broadly related to the focus of the workshop. Junior participants, including advanced graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and junior faculty, will be given priority, and will be supported by Simons Fellowships to supplement, as appropriate, funding from their home institutions. Some support may be available for senior applicants as well. The goals of the workshop make it necessary to limit the number of participants, but we hope to have as many as 10-15 junior visitors in residence at a given time during the workshops, and will consider applications for visits of 1-5 weeks in duration.
Applications should be submitted on or before April 2
by filling out the online form at
http://insti.physics.sunysb.edu/itp/simonsworkII/apply .
Please arrange for one letter of recommendation to be
emailed to simonswork
insti.physics.sunysb.edu .
Participants will be notified by late April, and will be supported
by Simons Fellowships.
The C. N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Department of Mathematics at Stony Brook are proud of their tradition of close collaboration, dating back to a joint seminar initiated by the Institute's founder, C. N. Yang together with James Simons. Today, string theory is a natural arena for this synergistic interaction. A large number of our faculty, postdocs, and graduate students are active in string theory and related mathematical areas. We anticipate that this workshop will continue the tradition of collaboration on a wider scale, with the help of the Simons Foundation, and we look forward to your participation.
Please feel free to get in touch with us at
simonsworkinsti.physics.sunysb.edu
for more information.
Details from last year's workshop can be found on the YITP webpage,
http://insti.physics.sunysb.edu/itp/conf/simonswork/
(comments on the workshop will soon be available at:
http://insti.physics.sunysb.edu/itp/conf/simonswork/comments ).
Further details of this summer's workshop will be posted here as they
become available.