6 Des 2012; Mat-Nat Faculty (UiTø), room A228. Thursday 14:00-15:00

Konrad Schöbel (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany)

“Separation of Variables and Moduli Spaces of Stable Curves”.

Integrable Killing tensors are used to classify orthogonal coordinates in which the classical Hamilton-Jacobi equation can be solved by a separation of variables.  We explicitly solve the integrability conditions for Killing tensors on the 3-sphere and recover the list of separable coordinate systems.

Moreover, this leads to an isomorphism between the moduli space of separation coordinates on S^n and a well known object in algebraic geometry: the moduli space of stable curves of genus zero with n+2 marked points.