Sara Pasquetti visited the Department of Mathematics at ETH in Zurich Switzerland this week and gave a talk in the Mathematical Physics Seminar on “Holomorphic blocks and q-deformed correlators“.  A link to the announcement is here. In the talk she discussed how supersymmetric partition functions on various compact manifolds in two, three, four and five dimensions can be expressed in terms of a universal set of building blocks, the holomorphic blocks. Two and four dimensional holomorphic blocks can be reinterpreted as conformal blocks in Liouville theory through the Alday-Gaiotto-Tachikawa correspondence. She provided a similar realisation of three and five dimensional holomorphic blocks in a q-deformed version of Liouville theory where the Virasoro algebra is replaced by the q-deformed Virasoro algebra.