Crystals, quiver varieties and coboundary categories for Kac-Moody algebras

Henriques and Kamnitzer have defined a commutor for the category of crystals of a finite-dimensional complex reductive Lie algebra that gives it the structure of a coboundary category (somewhat analogous to a braided monoidal category). Kamnitzer and Tingley then gave an alternative definition of the crystal commutor, using Kashiwara's involution on Verma crystals, that generalizes to the setting of symmetrizable Kac-Moody algebras. In the current paper, we give a geometric interpretation of the crystal commutor using quiver varieties. Equipped with this interpretation we show that the commutor endows the category of crystals of a symmetrizable Kac-Moody algebra with the structure of a coboundary category, answering in the affirmative a question of Kamnitzer and Tingley.