BPS spectra and 3-manifold invariants
Abstract
We provide a physical definition of new homological invariants of 3-manifolds (possibly, with knots) labeled by abelian flat connections. The physical system in question involves a 6d fivebrane theory on times a 2-disk, , whose Hilbert space of BPS states plays the role of a basic building block in categorification of various partition functions of 3d theory : half-index, superconformal index, and 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 . 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.
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)