English

Graph potentials and topological quantum field theories

Algebraic Geometry 2023-10-12 v2 Mathematical Physics Geometric Topology math.MP Quantum Algebra

Abstract

We introduce graph potentials, which are Laurent polynomials associated to (colored) trivalent graphs. We show that the birational type of the graph potential only depends on the homotopy type of the colored graph, and use this to define a topological quantum field theory. A similar construction was recently introduced independently by Kontsevich--Odesskii under the name of multiplicative kernels. We end our paper by giving an efficient computational method to compute its partition function. This is the first paper in a series, and we give a survey of the applications of graph potentials in the other parts.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2205.07244,
  title  = {Graph potentials and topological quantum field theories},
  author = {Pieter Belmans and Sergey Galkin and Swarnava Mukhopadhyay},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.07244},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

35 pages, improved exposition and included comparison to recent work of Kontsevich-Odesskii; split off from arXiv:2009.05568v2

R2 v1 2026-06-24T11:17:41.786Z