The ESI-Programme started with a full week (Monday to Friday) of introductory lectures as a service to the local community of researchers, to PhD students working in the field or starting to work in it, and to postdocs interested in entering the field.
There were four lectures per day (two in the morning, two in the afternoon). These introductory lectures were as elementary as possible, giving the relevant history and background of the subject, and leading up to the main ideas behind current developments. The purpose was to serve young researchers, get everyone on the same page, and create a good foundation on which to base the more specialized seminars and discussions of the following weeks of the programme.
History of the subject rooted in the Quantum Hall Effect, noncommutative geometry approach to the QHE, status of current experiments, fractional quantum Hall effect, classification of topological insulators and superconductors, tensor network states, entanglement, topological order and symmetry-protected topological phases.
Y. Avron, J. Bellissard, C.M. Marcus, M. Morgenstern, N. Read, S. Ryu, F. Verstraete, X.-G. Wen