Perturbative sigma models, elliptic cohomology and the Witten genus

Abstract

We provide a differential cocycle model for elliptic cohomology with complex coefficients and use analytic methods to construct a cocycle representative for the Witten class in this language. Our motivation stems from the conjectural connection between 2-dimensional field theories and elliptic cohomology originally due to G. Segal and E. Witten. The specifics of our constructions are informed by the work of S. Stolz and P. Teichner on super Euclidean field theories and K. Costello's construction of the Witten genus using perturbative quantization. As a warm-up, we prove analogous results for supersymmetric quantum mechanics and K-theory with complex coefficients.