Yaping Yang (University of Melbourne) will be speaking in the algebra seminar this week. We will go out for lunch after the talk---all are welcome to join! When: 12-1pm Friday November 8 Where: Carslaw 275 Title: Higher spin representations of the Yangian of sl_2 and R-matrices Abstract: For the Yangian of sl_2, higher spin representations are tensor products of the evaluation pullback of the \ell_i+1-dimensional irreducible representations of sl_2, where \ell_i are the highest weights. In my talk, I will give a geometric realization of the higher spin representations in terms of the critical cohomology of representations of the quiver with potential of Bykov and Zinn-Justin. Â I will also talk about the construction of R-matrices via the lattice model and the weight functions. This is based on my joint work with Paul Zinn-Justin.