Download or read book Hochschild Cohomology, Modular Tensor Categories, and Mapping Class Groups I written by Simon Lentner and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-07-25 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book addresses a key question in topological field theory and logarithmic conformal field theory: In the case where the underlying modular category is not semisimple, topological field theory appears to suggest that mapping class groups do not only act on the spaces of chiral conformal blocks, which arise from the homomorphism functors in the category, but also act on the spaces that arise from the corresponding derived functors. It is natural to ask whether this is indeed the case. The book carefully approaches this question by first providing a detailed introduction to surfaces and their mapping class groups. Thereafter, it explains how representations of these groups are constructed in topological field theory, using an approach via nets and ribbon graphs. These tools are then used to show that the mapping class groups indeed act on the so-called derived block spaces. Toward the end, the book explains the relation to Hochschild cohomology of Hopf algebras and the modular group.