Jones-Witten invariants for nonsimply connected Lie groups and the geometry of the Weyl alcove (Q1604327): Difference between revisions

The link invariants, and corresponding quantum invariants of 3-manifolds, derived from the relation, discovered by Witten, between the Jones polynomial and Chern-Simons theory have been defined in a rigorous mathematical setting by Reshetikhin and Turaev. The problem remains of linking the mathematical definition to the physical definition in terms of (mathematically ill defined) functional integrals on a space of connections. In the lack of a mathematical understanding of this definition, the functional integral formulation becomes a source of conjectures about these invariants. There are, however, cases where the predictions of this functional integral viewpoint don't seem to agree with the algebraic formulation of the invariants, as happens in the case of the discrepancy between the prediction of Dijkgraaf and Witten and the result of Frohman and Kania-Bartoszyńska in the case of the group \(SO(3)\). This paper considers the problem in a more general context: the first section reviews the construction of modular quotients of ribbon categories; the second section discusses the Weyl alcove in the representation theory of quantum groups at roots of unity, and gives a complete analysis of when a TQFT can be constructed from a quantum group associated to a classical, simple, connected, compact Lie group at any level; the remaining section describes when such categories and TQFT's factor into simpler theories, and identifies the corresponding factors.