Topological field theory

We begin with a general discussion of topological field theories, their defining properties, and classification. The first model we consider in detail (section 3) is supersymmetric quantum mechanics. Topological sigma models, their observables, and the associated mathematics of complex geometry and intersection theory are presented in section 4. Following this, topological gauge theories are discussed in section 5, with particular emphasis on Donaldson theory. The matematics here is necessarily much more sophisticated than at any other point in this report, and to bridge this gap, a mathematical review of gauge theory and moduli spaces has been included. An analysis of the geometry underlying Donaldson theory gives a general recipe for constructing field theories associated to moduli spaces in arbitrary dimensions, and as an example, we analyze in detail the super BF theories associated with flat connections. Chern-Simons theory and related BF models are the subject of section 6. The connections with knot theory are briefly reviewed and the link with 2D conformal field theory is sketched. We also consider 3D gravity from the Chern-Simons point of view. A presentation of the metric and gauge theory approaches to topological gravity in two dimensions is given. As in all quantum field theories, the issues of renormalization needs to be addressed, and one is obliged to show that the formal topological properties of these theories survive quantization. This point is considered in section 8. We present a detailed analysis of the beta function in certain Witten type theories, and compute one-loop effects in Chern-Simons theory. (orig./HSI)