Time: 4:00 p.m.
Location: 114 McAllister Building
Name: Jean-Michel Bismut
Affiliation: Universite Paris-Sud and NYU
Title: The hypoelliptic Laplacian and applications
Abstract: We construct a deformation of Hodge theory, whose corresponding a Laplacian is a hypoelliptic o perator on the cotangent bundle. This Laplacian interpolate between classical Hodge theory and the geodesic flow, ande more generally any Hamiltonian dynamical system. This Laplacian should be thought of as a semiclassical limit of the Witten deformation of the Laplacian on the loop space, associated to the energy functional on the loop space. Applications to the Ray-Singer analytic torsion will be presented.
