According to Segal and Atiyah, a quantum field theory on manifolds with boundary should be thought of as, roughly speaking, the assignment of a vector space (space of states) to the boundary and an element thereof (the state or the evolution operator) to the bulk, in a way that is compatible with gluing. In this talk (based on joint work with P. Mnev and N. Reshetikhin) I will describe how this has to be reformulated when working in perturbation theory. In particular, I will discuss the perturbative quantization of gauge theories on manifolds with boundary. It turns out that, under suitable assumptions, the bulk symmetries, treated in the BV formalism, naturally give rise to a cohomological description of the reduced phase space (BFV formalism) in a correlated way that can be quantized.

This talk will emphasize the general theory, whereas in the MathPhys talk I will focus on examples.