Categorification of Donaldson-Thomas invariants via perverse sheaves Young-Hoon Kiem Jun Li Department of Mathematics and Research Institute of Mathemat- ics, Seoul National University, Seoul 151-747, Korea E-mail address:
[email protected] Department of Mathematics, Stanford University, CA 94305, USA E-mail address:
[email protected] arXiv:1212.6444v5 [math.AG] 21 Mar 2016 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 14N35, 55N33 Key words and phrases. Donaldson-Thomas invariant, critical virtual manifold, semi-perfect obstruction theory, perverse sheaf, mixed Hodge module, categorification, Gopakumar-Vafa invariant. The first named author was supported in part by Korea NRF Grant 2011-0027969. The second named author was partially supported by NSF grant DMS-1104553 and DMS-1159156. Abstract. We show that there is a perverse sheaf on a fine moduli space of stable sheaves on a smooth projective Calabi-Yau 3-fold, which is locally the perverse sheaf of vanishing cycles for a local Chern-Simons functional. This perverse sheaf lifts to a mixed Hodge module and gives us a cohomology theory which enables us to define the Gopakumar-Vafa invariants mathematically. This paper is a completely rewritten version of the authors’ 2012 preprint, arXiv:1212.6444. Contents Preface vii Part 1. Critical virtual manifolds and perverse sheaves 1 Chapter 1. Critical virtual manifolds 5 1.1. Background 5 1.2. Definition of Critical Virtual Manifolds 6 1.3. Orientability of a critical virtual manifold 10 1.4. Semi-perfectobstructiontheoryandBehrend’stheorem 11 1.5. Critical virtual manifolds and d-critical loci 20 Chapter2. Perversesheavesoncriticalvirtualmanifolds 23 2.1. Perverse sheaves of vanishing cycles 23 2.2.