23 July 2014
Dr Jan Grabowski of the Algebra and Geometry research group has been awarded a grant of £98,000 by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
The project title is "Reconstructing broken symmetry" and concerns a phenomenon in noncommutative algebra known as "symmetry breaking" or "quantum rigidity". It is the observation that when quantizing algebras of functions on a space, the quantized algebra typically has many fewer automorphisms than its classical commutative counterpart.
The principal objective is to better understand this phenomenon by examining all the quantizations of a space as a category, to see whether some of the lost automorphisms are recovered as automorphisms of the category. More details may be found via the above link.
The project will begin in Autumn 2014 and will fund a Research Associate position in the department.