Symmetry, Integrability and Geometry: Methods and Applications (Nov 2008)
Deligne-Beilinson Cohomology and Abelian Link Invariants
Abstract
For the Abelian Chern-Simons field theory, we consider the quantum functional integration over the Deligne-Beilinson cohomology classes and we derive the main properties of the observables in a generic closed orientable 3-manifold. We present an explicit path-integral non-perturbative computation of the Chern-Simons link invariants in the case of the torsion-free 3-manifolds S^3, S^1 × S^2 and S^1 × Σ_g.