Ryan Grady: Observables and Index Theorems

Ryan Grady, University of Notre Dame The story of quantum field theory and index theory is of a happy marriage going back at least to the 1980's. In this talk we give a status report of a perturbative approach to the algebraic index theorem (and further the analytic index theorem). The key ingredient is the factorization algebra of observables in a one-dimensional Chern- Simons theory. This talk is based on joint work with Owen Gwilliam.