Seiberg-Witten Theory and Random Partitions
| MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS SEMINAR | |
| Topic: | Seiberg-Witten Theory and Random Partitions |
| Speaker: | Andrei Okounkov |
| Affiliation: | Princeton University |
| Date: | Tuesday, November 16 |
| Time/Room: | 4:00pm - 5:00pm/S-101 |
This will be an overview of the paper hep-th/0306238 written jointly with N. Nekrasov. Our main idea is the interpretation of the low-energy effective prepotential of the N=2 supersymmetric gauge theory as the free energy of a certain natural ensemble of random partitions in the thermodynamic limit. The thermodynamic limit of the free energy is controlled by the emerging limit shape of a random partition ("saddle point"). This limit shape can be determined explicitly and is found to be identical to the Seiberg-Witten curve. This proves the conjecture proposed by Nekrasov in hep-th/0206161 and provides a natural interpretation of all ingredients in the Seiberg-Witten prepotential.