English

Refined BPS state counting from Nekrasov's formula and Macdonald functions

High Energy Physics - Theory 2009-12-04 v5

Abstract

It has been argued that the Nekrasov's partition function gives the generating function of refined BPS state counting in the compactification of M theory on local Calabi-Yau spaces. We show that a refined version of the topological vertex we proposed before (hep-th/0502061) is a building block of the Nekrasov's partition function with two equivariant parameters. Compared with another refined topological vertex by Iqbal-Kozcaz-Vafa (hep-th/0701156), our refined vertex is expressed entirely in terms of the specialization of the Macdonald symmetric functions which is related to the equivariant character of the Hilbert scheme of points on C^2. We provide diagrammatic rules for computing the partition function from the web diagrams appearing in geometric engineering of Yang-Mills theory with eight supercharges. Our refined vertex has a simple transformation law under the flop operation of the diagram, which suggests that homological invariants of the Hopf link are related to the Macdonald functions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0805.0191,
  title  = {Refined BPS state counting from Nekrasov's formula and Macdonald functions},
  author = {Hidetoshi Awata and Hiroaki Kanno},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0805.0191},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

56 pages, 13 figures; v2 a few improvements, typos fixed, a reference added; v3 Appendix A revised, typos corrected; v4 equations in section 5 corrected, technical improvements on the specialization of the Macdonald function; v5 minor corrections

R2 v1 2026-06-21T10:36:45.745Z