Integrability, quantization and moduli spaces of curves (Q2012911)

This paper originates in part from the Habilitation mémoire (Université de Bourgogne, Dijon, 2016) of the author and in part from an introductory talk he gave at the RAQIS'16 conference held at Geneva, Switzerland, in August 2016. It deals with a novel construction that associates an integrable, tau-symmetric hierarchy and its quantization to a cohomological field theory on the moduli space of stable curves, without the semi-simplicity assumption which is needed for the Dubrovin-Zhang hierarchy. It is inspired by Eliashberg, Givental and Hofer's symplectic field theory [\textit{Y. Eliashberg} et al., in: GAFA 2000. Visions in mathematics---Towards 2000. Proceedings of a meeting, Tel Aviv, Israel, August 25--September 3, 1999. Part II. Basel: Birkhäuser. 560--673 (2000; Zbl 0989.81114)] and is the fruit of a joint project of the author with A. Buryak, B. Dubrovin and J. Guéré (see e.g. [\textit{A. Buryak}, et al. ``Tau-structure for the double ramification hierarchies'', \url{arXiv:1602.05423}; ``Integrable systems of double ramification type'', \url{arXiv:1609.04059}]). After a self contained introduction to the language of integrable systems in the formal loop space and the needed notions from the geometry of the moduli space of stable curves the author explains the double ramification hierarchy construction and presents its main features, with an accent on the quantization procedure, concluding with a list of examples worked out in detail. This paper does not contain new results and most of this material originates from an ongoing collaboration with A. Buryak, B. Dubrovin and J. Guéré. It is however a complete reorganization and, in part, a rephrasing of those results with the aim of showcasing the power of these methods and making them more accessible to the mathematical physics community.