Friday, 12 October 2012

mirror symmetry - Which part of physical B model is not rigorous?

To define (as Kevin Lin does above) the B-model purely as the derived category of coherent sheaves is fine and rigorous, but it ignores the higher-genus aspects of mirror symmetry -- which was the original question. As I wrote above, Kevin Costello gives a rigorous description of the higher-genus amplitudes, but it is still conjectural whether this agrees with the physics. The issue is that higher-genus string amplitudes depend on an integration over the moduli space of Riemann surfaces (or a space of maps from them, depending on the model), and this demands compactification. The full, non-topological theory is of course an ordinary two-dimensional quantum field theory, with all the usual difficulties in making the path integral rigorous.

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