High Energy Theory Group Meeting: The Higgs Mechanism — Kibble’s work from a geometric perspective

Abstract: 

It is well known that Kibble introduced the non Abelian Higgs mechanism in 1967. Less known is the fact that his work has a geometric interpretation in the context of symplectic singularities, otherwise known as Higgs branches and Coulomb branches in theories with 8 supercharges. In this talk I will present a new tool to analyze Higgs branches — the Hasse diagram — which gives the physical information on the different phases that a gauge theory has on the moduli space. It is a simple object, easy to compute, and gives a very nice characterization of different moduli spaces.