Deligne-Beilinson cohomology and abelian link invariants (Q1018728)

The aim of this paper is the study of the abelian Chern-Simons topological quantum field theory in which a complete set of observables is given by Wilson line operators, i.e. exponential of the holonomies associated to oriented links or knots in a closed oriented threefold \(M_3\). The central tool used in this paper is real Deligne-Beilinson cohomology: this is justified by the fact that the configuration space is the set of \(U(1)\)-bundles on \(M_3\) up to gauge equivalence, which is exactly the same as the Deligne-Beilinson cohomology classes of weight one. The main result of the article is that for a generic \(M_3\), the Chern-Simons link invariants, which are the expected values of the Wilson line operators, satisfy the colour periodicity property, the ambient isotopy invariance and some satellite relations. The authors also compute explicitly these invariants in the different cases \(M_3=S^3\), \(S^1\times S^2\) and \(S^1 \times \Sigma_g\).