Date/Time
25 January 2026 - 30 January 2026

Organized by
Anna Beliakova (Universté at Zürich), Louis-Hadrien Robert (Université Clermont Auvergne)

Event page & registration
https://indico.global/event/9663/

Description

This event is the third instance of a series of conferences which we plan to organize at SwissMAP Research Station every second year. Our aim is to gather together both world experts and young researchers working on quantum topology to study the cutting edge problems in this field. Quantum topology was born in Geneva with the discovery by Vaughan Jones of the polynomial link invariant now named after him. This discovery shed light on unexpected connections between low-dimensional topology and C∗-algebras. Soon after that connections with quantum groups, category theory and statistical mechanics were made clear.

Further work led to the formulation by Atiyah and Witten [Wi] of the topological quantum field theory. Since then many important developments happened in the subject, notably the discovery of gauge-theoretical invariants of 4-manifolds by Taubes, Donaldson and Seiberg–Witten, the categorification program initiated by Crane, Frenkel and Yetter [CY, CF], the definition of Khovanov homology [Kh], or connections with symplectic geometry and Fukaya categories.

Nowadays quantum topology encompasses a variety of subtopics such as link homology and the quest for exotic structures, volume conjecture, (quantized) Teichmüller spaces, quantum representations of the mapping class group, fusion categories, non-semisimple TQFTs, etc.

In 2010, the EMS publishing house launched the journal Quantum Topology proving the coherence and the importance of the field. However there is at this moment no regular event that focuses on this subject, and we feel the need to fill this gap.

Schedule

Location
SwissMAP Research Station, Les Diablerets, Switzerland