English

Quantum K theory of Grassmannians, Wilson line operators, and Schur bundles

Algebraic Geometry 2025-09-05 v3 High Energy Physics - Theory Combinatorics

Abstract

We prove a `Whitney' presentation, and a `Coulomb branch' presentation, for the torus equivariant quantum K theory of the Grassmann manifold Gr(k;n)\mathrm{Gr}(k;n), inspired from physics, and stated in an earlier paper. The first presentation is obtained by quantum deforming the product of the Hirzebruch λy\lambda_y classes of the tautological bundles. In physics, the λy\lambda_y classes arise as certain Wilson line operators. The second presentation is obtained from the Coulomb branch equations involving the partial derivatives of a twisted superpotential from supersymmetric gauge theory. This is closest to a presentation obtained by Gorbounov and Korff, utilizing integrable systems techniques. Algebraically, we relate the Coulomb and Whitney presentations utilizing transition matrices from the (equivariant) Grothendieck polynomials to the (equivariant) complete homogeneous symmetric polynomials. Along the way, we calculate K-theoretic Gromov-Witten invariants of wedge powers of the tautological bundles on Gr(k;n)\mathrm{Gr}(k;n), using the `quantum=classical' statement.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2208.01091,
  title  = {Quantum K theory of Grassmannians, Wilson line operators, and Schur bundles},
  author = {Wei Gu and Leonardo C. Mihalcea and Eric Sharpe and Hao Zou},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2208.01091},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

39 pages; changes in this version: removed section about filtration of the QK theory ring (no longer needed); changed proofs of Thm. 8.2 and Thm. 11.12 so they now use an argument based on finiteness of certain completions (this fixed a gap in the previous version); added a reference to a finiteness criterion in Remark A.4; fixed few typos