One-dimensional Chern-Simons theory (Q644752)

A primary goal of quantum topology is to mathematically understand Chern-Simons invariants of \(3\)-manifolds, which are physically presented by path integrals. This paper studies a one-dimensional toy version of Chern-Simons theory, in the Batalin-Vilkovisky (BV) formalism, where the field takes values in a quadratic Lie algebra \(\mathfrak{g}\). To replace path integrals by finite dimensional integrals, the differential geometry of the circle is discretized by considering a differential graded Lie algebra (DGLA) structure on chains of a triangulation of the circle (a splitting of the circle into a finite number of segments) as a discrete analogue of a DGLA of \(\mathfrak{g}\)-valued differential forms. The effective action of the one-dimensional Chern-Simons theory on a triangulated circle is directly calculated by Theorem 1 (Equation 42). In order to show that this satisfies the appropriate analogue of the quantum master equation (QME), the effective action is reformulated using the operator formalism (Clifford algebras) in Theorem 2. Using this reformulation, in Sections 3.2.1 and 4.2, the authors construct an Atiyah-style topological quantum field theory (TQFT), associating operator-valued effective actions to triangulated one-dimensional cobordisms and sending concatenation of cobordisms to composition of operators, which is well-behaved with respect to simplicial aggregation (merging of simplices). The partition function is shown to satisfy a discrete version of the BV QME (Theorem 3), implying that the effective action of Theorem 1 satisfies the usual QME (Corollary 1). The hope is to gain insight for constructing a discrete version of \(3\)-dimensional Chern-Simons theory. Needless to say, that is a much more difficult problem, speculations about which are discussed in Section 1.3.