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Homological mirror symmetry is a mathematical conjecture made by Maxim Kontsevich. It seeks a systematic mathematical explanation for a phenomenon called mirror symmetry first observed by physicists studying string theory.
In an address to the 1994 International Congress of Mathematicians in Zürich, Kontsevich (1994) speculated that mirror symmetry for a pair of Calabi–Yau manifolds X and Y could be explained as an equivalence of a triangulated category constructed from the algebraic geometry of X (the derived category of coherent sheaves on X) and another triangulated category constructed from the symplectic geometry of Y (the derived Fukaya category).
Edward Witten originally described the topological twisting of the N=(2,2) supersymmetric field theory into what he called the A and B model topological string theories [ citation needed ]. These models concern maps from Riemann surfaces into a fixed target—usually a Calabi–Yau manifold. Most of the mathematical predictions of mirror symmetry are embedded in the physical equivalence of the A-model on Y with the B-model on its mirror X. When the Riemann surfaces have empty boundary, they represent the worldsheets of closed strings. To cover the case of open strings, one must introduce boundary conditions to preserve the supersymmetry. In the A-model, these boundary conditions come in the form of Lagrangian submanifolds of Y with some additional structure (often called a brane structure). In the B-model, the boundary conditions come in the form of holomorphic (or algebraic) submanifolds of X with holomorphic (or algebraic) vector bundles on them. These are the objects one uses to build the relevant categories[ citation needed ]. They are often called A and B branes respectively. Morphisms in the categories are given by the massless spectrum of open strings stretching between two branes[ citation needed ].
The closed string A and B models only capture the so-called topological sector—a small portion of the full string theory. Similarly, the branes in these models are only topological approximations to the full dynamical objects that are D-branes. Even so, the mathematics resulting from this small piece of string theory has been both deep and difficult.
The School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton devoted a whole year to Homological Mirror Symmetry during the 2016-17 academic year. Among the participants were Paul Seidel from MIT, Maxim Kontsevich from IHÉS, and Denis Auroux, from UC Berkeley. [1]
Only in a few examples have mathematicians been able to verify the conjecture. In his seminal address, Kontsevich commented that the conjecture could be proved in the case of elliptic curves using theta functions. Following this route, Alexander Polishchuk and Eric Zaslow provided a proof of a version of the conjecture for elliptic curves. Kenji Fukaya was able to establish elements of the conjecture for abelian varieties. Later, Kontsevich and Yan Soibelman provided a proof of the majority of the conjecture for nonsingular torus bundles over affine manifolds using ideas from the SYZ conjecture. In 2003, Paul Seidel proved the conjecture in the case of the quartic surface. In 2002 Hausel & Thaddeus (2002) explained SYZ conjecture in the context of Hitchin system and Langlands duality.
The dimensions hp,q of spaces of harmonic (p,q)-differential forms (equivalently, the cohomology, i.e., closed forms modulo exact forms) are conventionally arranged in a diamond shape called the Hodge diamond. These (p,q)-Betti numbers can be computed for complete intersections using a generating function described by Friedrich Hirzebruch. [2] [3] [4] For a three-dimensional manifold, for example, the Hodge diamond has p and q ranging from 0 to 3:
| h3,3 | ||||||
| h3,2 | h2,3 | |||||
| h3,1 | h2,2 | h1,3 | ||||
| h3,0 | h2,1 | h1,2 | h0,3 | |||
| h2,0 | h1,1 | h0,2 | ||||
| h1,0 | h0,1 | |||||
| h0,0 |
Mirror symmetry translates the dimension number of the (p, q)-th differential form hp,q for the original manifold into hn-p,q of that for the counter pair manifold. Namely, for any Calabi–Yau manifold the Hodge diamond is unchanged by a rotation by π radians and the Hodge diamonds of mirror Calabi–Yau manifolds are related by a rotation by π/2 radians.
In the case of an elliptic curve, which is viewed as a 1-dimensional Calabi–Yau manifold, the Hodge diamond is especially simple: it is the following figure.
| 1 | ||
| 1 | 1 | |
| 1 |
In the case of a K3 surface, which is viewed as 2-dimensional Calabi–Yau manifold, since the Betti numbers are {1, 0, 22, 0, 1}, their Hodge diamond is the following figure.
| 1 | ||||
| 0 | 0 | |||
| 1 | 20 | 1 | ||
| 0 | 0 | |||
| 1 |
In the 3-dimensional case, usually called the Calabi–Yau manifold, a very interesting thing happens. There are sometimes mirror pairs, say M and W, that have symmetric Hodge diamonds with respect to each other along a diagonal line.
M's diamond:
| 1 | ||||||
| 0 | 0 | |||||
| 0 | a | 0 | ||||
| 1 | b | b | 1 | |||
| 0 | a | 0 | ||||
| 0 | 0 | |||||
| 1 |
W's diamond:
| 1 | ||||||
| 0 | 0 | |||||
| 0 | b | 0 | ||||
| 1 | a | a | 1 | |||
| 0 | b | 0 | ||||
| 0 | 0 | |||||
| 1 |
M and W correspond to A- and B-model in string theory. Mirror symmetry not only replaces the homological dimensions but also the symplectic structure and complex structure on the mirror pairs. That is the origin of homological mirror symmetry.
In 1990-1991, Candelas et al. 1991 had a major impact not only on enumerative algebraic geometry but on the whole mathematics and motivated Kontsevich (1994). The mirror pair of two quintic threefolds in this paper have the following Hodge diamonds.
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In algebraic geometry, a Calabi–Yau manifold, also known as a Calabi–Yau space, is a particular type of manifold which has properties, such as Ricci flatness, yielding applications in theoretical physics. Particularly in superstring theory, the extra dimensions of spacetime are sometimes conjectured to take the form of a 6-dimensional Calabi–Yau manifold, which led to the idea of mirror symmetry. Their name was coined by Candelas et al. (1985), after Eugenio Calabi who first conjectured that such surfaces might exist, and Shing-Tung Yau (1978) who proved the Calabi conjecture.
Shing-Tung Yau is a Chinese-American mathematician and the William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University. In April 2022, Yau retired from Harvard to become a professor of mathematics at Tsinghua University.
In theoretical physics, T-duality is an equivalence of two physical theories, which may be either quantum field theories or string theories. In the simplest example of this relationship, one of the theories describes strings propagating in a spacetime shaped like a circle of some radius , while the other theory describes strings propagating on a spacetime shaped like a circle of radius proportional to . The idea of T-duality was first noted by Bala Sathiapalan in an obscure paper in 1987. The two T-dual theories are equivalent in the sense that all observable quantities in one description are identified with quantities in the dual description. For example, momentum in one description takes discrete values and is equal to the number of times the string winds around the circle in the dual description.
In algebraic geometry and theoretical physics, mirror symmetry is a relationship between geometric objects called Calabi–Yau manifolds. The term refers to a situation where two Calabi–Yau manifolds look very different geometrically but are nevertheless equivalent when employed as extra dimensions of string theory.
The mathematical term perverse sheaves refers to a certain abelian category associated to a topological space X, which may be a real or complex manifold, or a more general topologically stratified space, usually singular. This concept was introduced in the thesis of Zoghman Mebkhout, gaining more popularity after the (independent) work of Joseph Bernstein, Alexander Beilinson, and Pierre Deligne (1982) as a formalisation of the Riemann-Hilbert correspondence, which related the topology of singular spaces and the algebraic theory of differential equations. It was clear from the outset that perverse sheaves are fundamental mathematical objects at the crossroads of algebraic geometry, topology, analysis and differential equations. They also play an important role in number theory, algebra, and representation theory. The properties characterizing perverse sheaves already appeared in the 75's paper of Kashiwara on the constructibility of solutions of holonomic D-modules.
In mathematics, Floer homology is a tool for studying symplectic geometry and low-dimensional topology. Floer homology is a novel invariant that arises as an infinite-dimensional analogue of finite-dimensional Morse homology. Andreas Floer introduced the first version of Floer homology, now called Lagrangian Floer homology, in his proof of the Arnold conjecture in symplectic geometry. Floer also developed a closely related theory for Lagrangian submanifolds of a symplectic manifold. A third construction, also due to Floer, associates homology groups to closed three-dimensional manifolds using the Yang–Mills functional. These constructions and their descendants play a fundamental role in current investigations into the topology of symplectic and contact manifolds as well as (smooth) three- and four-dimensional manifolds.
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The Geometry Festival is an annual mathematics conference held in the United States.
The SYZ conjecture is an attempt to understand the mirror symmetry conjecture, an issue in theoretical physics and mathematics. The original conjecture was proposed in a paper by Strominger, Yau, and Zaslow, entitled "Mirror Symmetry is T-duality".
Mirror symmetry may refer to:
In string theory and related theories such as supergravity theories, a brane is a physical object that generalizes the notion of a point particle to higher dimensions. Branes are dynamical objects which can propagate through spacetime according to the rules of quantum mechanics. They have mass and can have other attributes such as charge.
Iakov (Yan) Soibelman born 15 April 1956 is a Russian American mathematician, professor at Kansas State University, member of the Kyiv Mathematical Society (Ukraine), founder of Manhattan Mathematical Olympiad.
In symplectic topology, a Fukaya category of a symplectic manifold is a category whose objects are Lagrangian submanifolds of , and morphisms are Lagrangian Floer chain groups: . Its finer structure can be described as an A∞-category.
In mathematics, specifically algebraic geometry, Donaldson–Thomas theory is the theory of Donaldson–Thomas invariants. Given a compact moduli space of sheaves on a Calabi–Yau threefold, its Donaldson–Thomas invariant is the virtual number of its points, i.e., the integral of the cohomology class 1 against the virtual fundamental class. The Donaldson–Thomas invariant is a holomorphic analogue of the Casson invariant. The invariants were introduced by Simon Donaldson and Richard Thomas (1998). Donaldson–Thomas invariants have close connections to Gromov–Witten invariants of algebraic three-folds and the theory of stable pairs due to Rahul Pandharipande and Thomas.
Richard Paul Winsley Thomas is a British mathematician working in several areas of geometry. He is a professor at Imperial College London. He studies moduli problems in algebraic geometry, and ‘mirror symmetry’—a phenomenon in pure mathematics predicted by string theory in theoretical physics.
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Mark William Gross is an American mathematician, specializing in differential geometry, algebraic geometry, and mirror symmetry.
In mathematics and theoretical physics, and especially gauge theory, the deformed Hermitian Yang–Mills (dHYM) equation is a differential equation describing the equations of motion for a D-brane in the B-model of string theory. The equation was derived by Mariño-Minasian-Moore-Strominger in the case of Abelian gauge group, and by Leung–Yau–Zaslow using mirror symmetry from the corresponding equations of motion for D-branes in the A-model of string theory.
In mathematics, mirror symmetry is a conjectural relationship between certain Calabi–Yau manifolds and a constructed "mirror manifold". The conjecture allows one to relate the number of rational curves on a Calabi-Yau manifold to integrals from a family of varieties. In short, this means there is a relation between the number of genus algebraic curves of degree on a Calabi-Yau variety and integrals on a dual variety . These relations were original discovered by Candelas, de la Ossa, Green, and Parkes in a paper studying a generic quintic threefold in as the variety and a construction from the quintic Dwork family giving . Shortly after, Sheldon Katz wrote a summary paper outlining part of their construction and conjectures what the rigorous mathematical interpretation could be.
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