The famous Hirzebruch signature theorem asserts that the signature of a closed oriented manifold is equal to the integral of the so called L-genus. An immediate corollary of this is the homotopy invariance of < L(M); [M ] >. The L-genus is a characteristic class of tangent bundles, so the above remark is a non-trivial fact. The problem of higher signatures is a generalization of the above consi...

Canonical quantization of abelian BF -type topological field theory coupled to extended sources on generic d-dimensional manifolds and with curved line bundles is studied. Sheaf cohomology is used to construct the appropriate topological extension of the action and the topological flux quantization conditions, in terms of the Čech cohomology of the underlying spatial manifold, as required for t...

In this paper, we use conformal field theory to construct a generalized cohomology theory which has some properties of elliptic cohomology theory which was some properties of elliptic cohomology. A part of our presentation is a rigorous definition of conformal field theory following Segal’s axioms, and some examples, such as lattice theories associated with a unimodular even lattice. We also in...