Yang Qui, USC

Abstract: The progress of TQFT has revealed connections between the algebraic world of tensor categories and the topological world of 3-manifolds, such as Reshetikhin-Turaev and Turaev-Viro theories. Motivated by M-theory in physics, Cho-Gang-Kim proposed another relation by outlining a program to construct modular data from certain classes of closed oriented 3-manifolds. In this talk, I will talk about our mathematical exploration of this program. This talk is based on the works joint with Shawn Cui, Paul Gustafson, Zhenghan Wang, and Qing Zhang.