Lectures on the langlands program and conformal field theory

Abstract

These lecture notes give an overview of recent results in geometric Langlands correspondence which may yield applications to quantum field theory. It has long been suspected that the Langlands duality should somehow be related to various dualities observed in quantum field theory and string theory. Indeed, both the Langlands correspondence and the dualities in physics have emerged as some sort of non-abelian Fourier transforms. Moreover, the so-called Langlands dual group introduced by R. Langlands in [1] that is essential in the formulation of the Langlands correspondence also plays a prominent role in the study of S-dualities in physics and was in fact also introduced by the physicists P. Goddard, J. Nuyts and D. Olive in the framework of four-dimensional gauge theory [2]. © 2007 Springer.