Citation: Reshetikhin, Nicolai, and Vladimir G. Turaev. "Invariants of 3-manifolds via link polynomials and quantum groups." Inventiones mathematicae 103.1 (1991): 547-597.
Web: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01239527
Tags: Foundational, Mathematical
Witten's knot invariant paper was groundbreaking, but (to quote the authors) it was on a "physical level of rigor". In this paper, Reshetikhin-Turaev define a new family of knot invariants from manifolds (i.e. TQFTs). To quote the authors again: "our invariants may be viewed as a mathematical realization of the Witten's program".
This procedure takes in a modular tensor category, and spits out a topological quantum field theory. It is exactly this construction which allows us to say that there is a mathematical connection between MTCs and TQFTs. Of course, it is not proved in this paper that the correspondence induces a bijection. To make the bijection work you need to add extra data on both sides of the equation and work out a lot of details, which was finally done in
> Bartlett, Bruce, et al. "Modular categories as representations of the 3-dimensional bordism 2-category." arXiv preprint arXiv:1509.06811 (2015).
This paper mostly uses the language of Hopf algebras and quantum groups.