13h10 Friday 18 January 2008 Special Colloquium in BA 6183

Speaker: Spyridon Alexakis (Princeton University)

Title: The decomposition of global conformal invariants: On a conjecture of Deser and Schwimmer

Abstract: 
Global conformal invariants are integrals of geometric scalar
quantities whcih remain invariant under confromal changes of the 
underlying metric. I will discuss (parts of) my recent proof of a conjecture of Deser 
and Schwimmer which asserted that any such global invariant can be decomposed 
into "building blocks" of three standard types. Time permitting, I will also 
discuss some applications and related open questions.