Speaker: Erik Carlsson of Northwestern University

Title: Vertex operators on the K-theory of the Hilbert scheme

Abstract: I'll present some recent work with Nikita Nekrasov and Andrei Okounkov on a collection of vertex operators on the (equivariant) K-theory of the hilbert scheme of points on a smooth surface. The point of these operators is that they generalize to K-theory, and all surfaces, computations of cup product constants, and some correlation functions in supersymmetric 4d gauge theory. Instead of attacking these computations in the general setting, I'll focus on a simple equivariant surface, and show how these operators fit in to the well-studied dictionary between the topology of the hilbert scheme, and 2D CFT.