14/03/2024

'Special Holonomy' brings together 100 participants at IMPA.

With 23 lectures and more than 20 poster sessions, the Special Holonomy and Geometric Structures on Complex Manifolds brings together 100 participants at IMPA. The event, which runs until Friday (15), features internationally renowned researchers in the field. For the first time at the institute, physicist Bobby Acharya (King's College London) said it was a pleasure to get to know IMPA.

“I wanted to thank our colleagues who are here at this lovely workshop. It’s a pleasure to be at IMPA for the first time. It really is a lovely place. Today, I’m going to entertain you with a bit of physics, but the objects of study will be cones with special holonomy. So, since we have a mixed audience, I’ll spend a few minutes showing the framework in which this work is established,” said the researcher when addressing the topic “ Special Holonomy Cones, Conformal Field Theories and Confinement in Five Dimensions” last Wednesday (13).

On the same day, physicist Mirjam Cvetic, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, attended the meeting and spoke about "Higher Symmetries of Quantum Field Theory from String Theory on Singular (Non-)Compact Special Holonomy Spaces."

Robert Bryant (Duke University) and Ilka Agricola (University of Marburg) are among the mathematicians who also participated in the “Special Holonomy” event. This event was a partnership between IMPA and the Simons Foundation – a private American institution that funds research in mathematics and basic sciences.

For UFRJ master's student Yan Robert, the meeting is an opportunity to get closer to the work of renowned researchers. “It's a chance to appreciate research from abroad, from people who are difficult to contact. So, an event like this opens up a range of opportunities. We can attend any lecture and realize that the topic has some relation to what we study.”

Gustavo Martins, a doctoral student at IMPA, says he was drawn to the event because of the new information available. "In a doctoral program, you focus on very specific points, so this event allows you to broaden your knowledge within the world of geometry, which is very wide."