Vogel's Universality and its Applications

Abstract: The present thesis represents developments in two main directions related to the simple Lie algebras. The first one is devoted to the representation theory of the simple Lie algebras. Specifically, we present recent results, which include new universal formulae in Vogel's universal description, as well as the discovery of additional properties of those formulae. In the second part of the thesis, we demonstrate applications of Vogel's description to the study of a physical theory. Namely, we explicitly formulate the { \it refined} Chern-Simons theories on $S^3$ for each of the simple gauge groups, including the exceptional ones.