No label defined (Q4234985)

In these lecture notes recent developments in topological invariants of 3-manifolds are described arising from the perturbative expansion of the partition function of the Chern-Simons action, looking at the asymptotic expansion of the partition function \(Z_k(M)\) as \(k\) tends to infinity (defined formally as a path integral, involving the Chern-Simons invariant of a connection, over the space of connections of a principal \(G\)-bundle over a 3-manifold \(M)\), Among the topics treated are: basic facts on classical Chern-Simons theory; explanation of the stationary phase method in a finite-dimensional case; the reason why it is expected that the main term of the perturbative expansion of the Chern-Simons partition function contains the Ray-Singer torsion and the eta-invariant; an introduction to the method of Axelrod and Singer and the topological invariance of the integrals associated with Feynman diagrams; Chern-Simons perturbative theory for 3-manifolds with boundary: the case of a product of a surface with an interval; Poisson structure of chord diagrams on surfaces; the elliptic KZ-system giving an analogue of the Kontsevich integral in the case of elliptic curves. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0901.00045].