Measures on Banach Manifolds and Supersymmetric Quantum Field Theory

We show how to construct measures on Banach manifolds associated to supersymmetric quantum field theories. These measures are mathematically well-defined objects inspired by the formal path integrals appearing in the physics literature on quantum field theory. We give three concrete examples of our construction. The first example is a family of measures on a space of functions on the two-torus, parametrized by a polynomial P (the Wess-Zumino-Landau-Ginzburg model). The second is a family of measures on a space of maps from to a Lie group (the Wess-Zumino-Novikov-Witten model). Finally we study a family of measures on the product of a space of connections on the trivial principal bundle with structure group G on a three-dimensional manifold M with a space of -valued three-forms on M. We show that these measures are positive, and that the measures are Borel probability measures. As an application we show that formulas arising from expectations in the measures reproduce formulas discovered by Frenkel and Zhu in the theory of vertex operator algebras. We conjecture that a similar computation for the measures , where M is a homology three-sphere, will yield the Casson invariant of M. Dedicated to the memory of Raoul Bott Supported in part by NSF grant DMS 04/05670.