Topological Quantum Field Theory - Overview

Overview

In a topological field theory, the correlation functions do not depend on the metric of spacetime. This means that the theory is not sensitive to changes in the shape of spacetime; if the spacetime warps or contracts, the correlation functions do not change. Consequently, they are topological invariants.

Topological field theories are not very interesting on the flat Minkowski spacetime used in particle physics. Minkowski space can be contracted to a point, so a TQFT on Minkowski space computes only trivial topological invariants. Consequently, TQFTs are usually studied on curved spacetimes, such as, for example, Riemann surfaces. Most of the known topological field theories are defined on spacetimes of dimension less than five. It seems that a few higher dimensional theories exist, but they are not very well understood.

Quantum gravity is believed to be background-independent (in some suitable sense), and TQFTs provide examples of background independent quantum field theories. This has prompted ongoing theoretical investigation of this class of models.

(Caveat: It is often said that TQFTs have only finitely many degrees of freedom. This is not a fundamental property. It happens to be true in most of the examples that physicists and mathematicians study, but it is not necessary. A topological sigma model with target infinite-dimensional projective space, if such a thing could be defined, would have countably infinitely many degrees of freedom.)