High Energy Theory Seminar

In this talk I will review some aspects of a recently proposed duality between topological string on toric Calabi-Yau manifolds and the spectral theory of trace class operators. I will discuss the relation between this construction and Painlevé equations which can be used to prove the duality in a 4-dimensional limit. In addition I will apply these results to study Seiberg-Witten theory in the 4-dimensional self-dual omega background and show that this theory admits a dual description in terms of an ideal Fermi gas.