Como lectures

I’m giving some lectures at the SIGRAV school in Como on “Non-commutative geometry and quantum gravity”. I’ll put the slides up here as they happen.

Lecture 1: The Planck scale. This lecture reviews the experimental evidence for a fundamental Planck scale. Various theoretical approaches to modelling the Planck scale are mentioned very briefly, mainly concentrating on the predictions of the spectral action suggested by non-commutative geometry.

Lecture 2: Non-commutative geometry: axioms, examples. The axioms of non-commutative geometry are given in this lecture alongside an explanation of how they are satisfied by an ordinary (commutative) manifold. The example given by the standard model internal space is also summarised.

Lecture 3: Matrix geometries and fuzzy spheres. The lecture explains my project to replace the usual space-time manifold with a non-commutative geometry based on finite-dimensional matrices. Examples with spherical symmetry are considered.

Lecture 4: State sum models, using 2d examples. A different topic is introduced in this lecture: 2d topological state sum models defined using a diagrammatic calculus. Some recent progress in defining models that are sensitive to the spin structure of the surface (and are thus fermionic) is explained.

Lecture 5: Non-commutative geometry in 2d state sum models. The final lecture connects the topic of state sum models and non-commutative geometry. It shows how defects in a 2d state sum model can carry a non-commutative geometry.

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Giving the lectures turned out to be enormously useful. I’m writing a paper called “matrix geometries and fuzzy spaces as spectral triples“, which I hope will appear soon is out now. The paper will be much better for having had to explain the ideas in the lectures.