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Math-Physics Joint Seminar

Wednesday, November 17, 2010 - 10:00am

Wenxuan Lu

MIT

Location

University of Pennsylvania

DRL 4E19

We study two instanton correction problems of Hitchin’s moduli spaces along with their wall crossing formulas. The hyperkahler metric of a Hitchin’s moduli space can be put into an instanton-corrected form according to physicists Gaiotto, Moore and Neitzke. The problem boils down to the construction of a set of special coordinates which can be constructed as Fock-Goncharov coordinates associated with foliations of quadratic differentials on a Riemann surface. A wall crossing formula of Kontsevich and Soibelman arises both as a crucial consistency condition and an effective computational tool. On the other hand Gross and Siebert have succeeded in determining instanton corrections of complex structures of Calabi-Yau varieties in the context of mirror symmetry from a singular affine structure with additional data. We will show that the two instanton correction problems are equivalent in an appropriate sense. This is a nontrivial statement of mirror symmetry of Hitchin’s moduli spaces which till now has been mostly studied in the framework of geometric Langlands duality. This result provides examples of Calabi-Yau varieties where the instanton correction (in the sense of mirror symmetry) of metrics and complex structures can be determined.