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Sergei Novikov generalized this construction to a homology theory associated to a closed one-form on a manifold. Morse homology is a special case for the one-form df. A special case of Novikov's theory is circle-valued Morse theory, which Michael Hutchings and Yi-Jen Lee have connected to Reidemeister torsion and Seiberg–Witten theory.
Before Morse, Arthur Cayley and James Clerk Maxwell had developed some of the ideas of Morse theory in the context of topography. Morse originally applied his theory to geodesics (critical points of the energy functional on the space of paths). These techniques were used in Raoul Bott's proof of his periodicity theorem. The analogue of Morse ...
The theory of pseudo-Hermitian supersymmetric operators [20] and the relation between the Parisi-Sourlas method and Lyapunov exponents [2] further enabled the extension of the theory to SDEs of arbitrary form and the identification of the spontaneous BRST supersymmetry breaking as a stochastic generalization of chaos.
A third area mentioned in Atiyah's address is Witten's work relating supersymmetry and Morse theory, [29] a branch of mathematics that studies the topology of manifolds using the concept of a differentiable function.
Supersymmetry is an integral part of string theory, a possible theory of everything. There are two types of string theory, supersymmetric string theory or superstring theory, and non-supersymmetric string theory. By definition of superstring theory, supersymmetry is required in superstring theory at some level.
Because of this, the Witten index is independent of the temperature and gives the number of zero energy bosonic vacuum states minus the number of zero energy fermionic vacuum states. In particular, if supersymmetry is spontaneously broken then there are no zero energy ground states and so the Witten index is equal to zero.
In theoretical physics, more specifically in quantum field theory and supersymmetry, supersymmetric Yang–Mills, also known as super Yang–Mills and abbreviated to SYM, is a supersymmetric generalization of Yang–Mills theory, which is a gauge theory that plays an important part in the mathematical formulation of forces in particle physics.
The motivation for a supersymmetric version of gauge theory can be the fact that gauge invariance is consistent with supersymmetry. The first examples were discovered by Bruno Zumino and Sergio Ferrara, and independently by Abdus Salam and James Strathdee in 1974.