Michele Schiavina

Assistant Professor @ Università di Pavia:
Department of Mathematics, Via Ferrata 5, 27100 Pavia, Italy.
name.surname - at - unipv.it

I am an Assistant Professor (''Ricercatore tipo B'') at the University of Pavia. My research lies at the interface between mathematics and theoretical physics. I am committed to the development of mathematics in the areas of differential and symplectic geometry as well as homological algebra and Lie theory, in order to rigorously phrase and solve relevant problems in theoretical physics related to general relativity, classical and quantum field theory and quantum information theory.

Are you interested in Mathematical Physics activities in Pavia? Follow our Joint Mathematical Physics Seminar

Research

I am interested in a variety of topics, spanning from classical and quantum field theory, gravity and string theory, as well as applications to dynamical systems and geometric quantum information theory.

The broad research area I have been working on revolves around a cohomological approach to several questions arising from the study of classical and quantum field theory on manifolds with boundary (and corners). I use both symplectic and cohomological methods to this aim, all of which combine into a modern mathematical approach to variational problems with local symmetries on manifolds (possibly) with boundary, and to their quantisation.

Here is a brief outline of the main research lines I am currently interested in.

Hamiltonian gauge theory on manifolds with corners

Symplectic reduction by stages and classical superselection.
This project is about studying the Hamiltonian formulation of gauge theory on space-time manifolds endowed with a codimension-1 submanifold with boundary. The latter is thought of as a corner component for the spacetime manifold. We characterise the reduced phase space of the theory whenever it is described by a local momentum map for the action of the gauge group G, by adapting Fréchet symplectic reduction by stages to the case of gauge subgroups. This approach procudes a classical counterpart of the known quantum superselection rules for the algebra of observables of a quantum field theory, thus providing a roadmap to generalisation of classical results to more involved scenarios.

BV-BFV approach to General Relativity

Cohomological methods for gravitational models on manifolds with boundary.
Within the BV-BFV framework, I work on the development of a cohomological approach to general relativity (GR) on manifolds with boundary. This program connects to a diverse landscape of research endeavours, and the application to general relativity tackles one of the most long-standing problems in theoretical and mathematical physics.

This analysis led me to find a discrepancy that arises when comparing two models of gravity that are otherwise supposed to be equivalent: the Einstein–Hilbert (EH) and Palatini–Cartan (PC) formulations of GR in dimension four and higher. Specifically, certain cohomological data, which are naturally assigned to either model, differ in the presence of boundaries.

The outlook of this extended program is that of addressing (non)perturbative quantisation of general relativity (with boundary). A large part of my research is then devoted to understanding and overcoming boundary and corner obstructions such as these, furthering our understanding of general relativity.

Dynamical zeta functions and field theory

A new perspective on Fried's conjecture.
Recently, we were able to find a simple rewriting of a longstanding conjecture due to Fried, which asserts the equivalence of Ruelle’s dynamical zeta function for chaotic (Anosov) flows and the analytic torsion of Ray and Singer. This arises as an application to dynamical systems of the Batalin–Vilkovisky formalism, which frames Fried’s conjecture as the invariance of a physical quantity on a “nonphysical” choice. Our interpretation offers an explanation of the conjecture itself and a heuristic argument in its favour.

Inspired by classic results by A. Schwarz, who showed how the analytic torsion can be represented by the partition function of a field theory called BF theory, we have shown that the Ruelle zeta can be similarly linked to the same theory. Indeed, BF theory can be endowed with an unusual class of gauge-fixing conditions on manifolds that admit a contact structure, a central example being given by sphere bundles of (hyperbolic) Riemannian manifolds, for whose geoedesic flows the Ruelle zeta function is well-defined as a meromorphic function.

Extensions of this program involve looking at different examples of type-A flows (such as Morse-Smale), and relaxing some assumptions that led to our previous results on Ruezze zeta function as a nonperturbative object of quantum BF theory.

Bulk-boundary correspondences and BV

A cohomological treatment of holographic correspondences.
Cohomological techniques are useful to address a broad variety of bulk-boundary correspondences, which I will collectively label as holography for simplicity. These are central to modern investigations in the fields of condensed matter, high energy physics and gravity, for which they are of key relevance, but they also present rich opportunities for the development of pure mathematics.

In order to understand holography, the main guiding example for our purposes has been a well-studied correspondence between Chern–Simons (CS) theory on a three dimensional manifold, and the (chiral, gauged) Wess–Zumino–Witten (WZW) model supported on its boundary. The quantum data of the two models are related: the space of solutions of certain symmetry relations called ‘conformal Ward identities’, satisfied by the correlation functions for the WZW model, coincides with the space of states associated to CS theory. The CS/WZW example is relevant for gravity, which in three dimensions can be cast as a CS theory, as well as for condensed matter applications, since CS theory describes quantum Hall systems.

Using a framework due to Alexandrov, Kontsevich, Schwarz and Zaboronski we showed how one can recover the WZW model for a group-valued field starting from the “infinitesimal” data given by the BFV structure for Chern–Simons theory. Indeed, this approach also gives a field theoretic interpretation of Lie III theorem, readily generaliseable to problems of integration of more general algebraic structures.

Publications

Preprints

Published papers

Thesis

Curriculum Vitae

Assistant Professor (Ricercatore tipo b)

Università di Pavia

co-funded by ``Rita Levi Montalcini'' program

Sept 2022 - present

Senior Postdoc (Oberassistent)

ETH Zurich

Department of Mathematics
Affiliated with Institute for Theoretical Physics

Oct 2021 - Sept 2022

Postdoctoral Fellow

ETH Zurich

Joint position between Department of Mathematics and Institute for Theoretical Physics
Research group leaders: G. Felder and N. Beisert

Feb 2019 - Oct 2021

SNSF Postdoctoral fellow

University of California, Berkeley

`Postdoc Mobility' Research Grant, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Research group leader: N. Reshetikhin

Aug 2016 - Feb 2019

Guest Researcher

Max Planck Institute for Mathematics, Bonn

Visiting Researcher

Mar 2018 - Aug 2018

Postdoctoral Fellow

University of Zurich

Research group leader: A.S. Cattaneo

May 2016 - Jul 2016

Teaching

Since the Fall of 2023 I have taught `Geometric Structures in Mathematical Physics`, a master course for mathematics students.

Since the Fall of 2022 I have taught modules within the `Mathematical Physics` and `Rational Mechanics' bachelor courses, for engineering students, and `Mathematics for Geology', a course for bachelor geology students at the University of Pavia.

In the Spring of 2022 I have taught `Geometric Methods for Mathematical Physics`, a course for mathematics and physics master students at ETH Zurich.

In the Spring of 2021 I have taught 'Mathematical Aspects of Classical and Quantum Field Theory', a course for mathematics and physics master students at ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich, in collaboration with G. Canepa (UZH).

In the Fall of 2020 I have coordinated tutors for 'Classical Mechanics', taught by Prof. Niklas Beisert.


In the Fall of 2019 I taught 'Field theory with symmetries and the Batalin-Vilkovisky formalism', a course for mathematics and physics master students at ETH Zurich.

Other Things About me

In my spare time I play electric bass and drums.
This is a project I contributed to while in Zurich

A previous musical project of mine is called ECHOMOSTRO,
a musical experiment that bulges from the landscapes of contemporary music like an abusive swelling of sound.
Here is how it sounds like: