English

BPS spectra and 3-manifold invariants

High Energy Physics - Theory 2017-05-25 v2 Mathematical Physics Geometric Topology math.MP Quantum Algebra

Abstract

We provide a physical definition of new homological invariants Ha(M3)\mathcal{H}_a (M_3) of 3-manifolds (possibly, with knots) labeled by abelian flat connections. The physical system in question involves a 6d fivebrane theory on M3M_3 times a 2-disk, D2D^2, whose Hilbert space of BPS states plays the role of a basic building block in categorification of various partition functions of 3d N=2\mathcal{N}=2 theory T[M3]T[M_3]: D2×S1D^2\times S^1 half-index, S2×S1S^2\times S^1 superconformal index, and S2×S1S^2\times S^1 topologically twisted index. The first partition function is labeled by a choice of boundary condition and provides a refinement of Chern-Simons (WRT) invariant. A linear combination of them in the unrefined limit gives the analytically continued WRT invariant of M3M_3. The last two can be factorized into the product of half-indices. We show how this works explicitly for many examples, including Lens spaces, circle fibrations over Riemann surfaces, and plumbed 3-manifolds.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1701.06567,
  title  = {BPS spectra and 3-manifold invariants},
  author = {Sergei Gukov and Du Pei and Pavel Putrov and Cumrun Vafa},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1701.06567},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

v2: 80 pages, 7 figures, typos corrected, exposition improved with three newly added subsections (2.3, 2.4, 2.10)

R2 v1 2026-06-22T17:57:41.524Z