1 Introduction
Hilbert schemes have been studied extensively since the pioneering work of Grothendieck [Reference Grothendieck14]. It is well known [Reference Briancon3, Reference Fogarty10, Reference Iarrobino16] that the Hilbert schemes of points, parametrizing $0$ -dimensional closed subschemes, on algebraic surfaces are smooth and irreducible. In fact, these Hilbert schemes are crepant resolutions of the symmetric products of the corresponding surfaces, via the Hilbert-Chow morphism which maps a $0$ -dimensional closed subscheme to its support (counting with multiplicities). Their extremal Gromov-Witten invariants are defined via the moduli spaces of stable maps whose images are contracted by the Hilbert-Chow morphism and are motivated by Ruan’s Cohomological Crepant Resolution Conjecture [Reference Ruan39] which eventually evolves to the Crepant Resolution Conjecture of Bryan and Graber [Reference Bryan and Graber4], Coates, Corti, Iritani and Tseng [Reference Coates, Corti, Iritani and Tseng5], and Coates and Ruan [Reference Coates and Ruan7]. Their $1$ -point genus- $0$ extremal Gromov-Witten invariants are obtained in [Reference Li and Qin27]. Okounkov and Pandharipande [Reference Okounkov and Pandharipande36] studied the genus- $0$ equivariant extremal Gromov-Witten theory of the Hilbert schemes of points on the affine plane $ {\mathbb C} ^2$ . Using cosection localization theory [Reference Kiem and Li17], J. Li and W-P. Li [Reference Li and Li23] determined the $2$ -point genus- $0$ extremal Gromov-Witten invariants of the Hilbert schemes of points on surfaces. The structures of the $3$ -point genus- $0$ extremal Gromov-Witten invariants of these Hilbert schemes are analyzed in [Reference Li and Qin28] where Ruan’s Cohomological Crepant Resolution Conjecture for the Hilbert-Chow morphism is verified. Higher genus equivariant extremal Gromov-Witten theory of the Hilbert schemes of points on $ {\mathbb C} ^2$ is investigated by Pandharipande and Tseng [Reference Pandharipande and Tseng37]. We refer to the survey book [Reference Qin38] for more details and to [Reference Maulik and Oblomkov33, Reference Oberdieck35] for related works.
In this paper, we work out explicitly all the extremal Gromov-Witten invariants of the Hilbert scheme of $3$ points on a smooth projective complex surface X. Let $ X^{[n]}$ be the Hilbert scheme of n points on X. For $n \ge 2$ , the extremal k-point genus-g Gromov-Witten invariants of $ X^{[n]}$ are of the form
where $d \ge 0$ , $\gamma _1, \ldots , \gamma _k \in H^*( X^{[n]}, {\mathbb C})$ , and $\beta _n$ is (the homology class of the curve)
with $x_1, x_2, \ldots , x_{n-1}$ being distinct and fixed points in X. By degree reasons, if $g \ge 2$ , all genus-g extremal Gromov-Witten invariants of $ X^{[n]}$ are equal to $0$ .
We begin with genus- $0$ extremal Gromov-Witten invariants of $ X^{[3]}$ . By the Fundamental Class Axiom and the Divisor Axiom, these invariants are reduced to the following $1$ -point, $2$ -point and $3$ -point genus- $0$ extremal Gromov-Witten invariants:
with $\tilde \omega _1, \tilde \omega _2 \in H^*(X^{[3]}, {\mathbb C})$ and $\omega _1, \omega _2, \omega _3 \in H^4( X^{[3]}, {\mathbb C} )$ . The invariants $\langle \tilde \omega _1 \rangle _{0, d\beta _3}$ and $\langle \tilde \omega _1, \tilde \omega _2 \rangle _{0, d\beta _3}$ have been computed in [Reference Li and Qin27] and [Reference Li and Li23], respectively. When $X={\mathbb P}^2$ , $\langle \omega _1, \omega _2, \omega _3 \rangle _{0, d\beta _3}$ is partially calculated in [Reference Edidin, Li and Qin8]. The calculations in the 2003 paper [Reference Edidin, Li and Qin8] for $X={\mathbb P}^2$ are incomplete due to the lack of understanding of the invariants $\langle \tilde \omega _1, \tilde \omega _2 \rangle _{0, d\beta _3}$ which appear later in the 2011 paper [Reference Li and Li23]. To state our result, we fix a linear basis of $H^{4}( X^{[3]}, {\mathbb C} )$ via the Heisenberg operators of Grojnowski [Reference Grojnowski13] and Nakajima [Reference Nakajima34]:
where $\{\alpha _1, \ldots , \alpha _s \}$ is a linear basis of $H^2(X, {\mathbb C} )$ , $1 \le i, j \le s$ and $1_X$ and x stand for the fundamental classes of X and a point in X, respectively. Let $\langle \alpha , \beta \rangle = \alpha \cdot \beta $ denote the standard pairing for $\alpha , \beta \in H^*(X, {\mathbb C} )$ .
Theorem 1.1. Let X be a simply connected projective surface. Let ${\mathfrak B}^4$ stand for the linear basis of $H^{4}( X^{[3]}, {\mathbb C} )$ from (1.1). Let $d \ge 1$ and $\omega _1, \omega _2, \omega _3 \in {\mathfrak B}^4$ . Then,
if the unordered triple $(\omega _1, \omega _2, \omega _3)$ is not one of the following cases:
-
(i) $\Big ({\mathfrak a}_{-2}(1_X){\mathfrak a}_{-1}(\alpha _i)|0\rangle , {\mathfrak a}_{-2}(1_X){\mathfrak a}_{-1}(\alpha _j)|0\rangle , {\mathfrak a}_{-1}(1_X){\mathfrak a}_{-2}(\alpha _k)|0\rangle \Big )$ ;
-
(ii) $\omega _1= \omega _2 = {\mathfrak a}_{-3}(1_X)|0\rangle $ , and $\omega _3 = {\mathfrak a}_{-2}(1_X){\mathfrak a}_{-1}(\alpha _i)|0\rangle $ or ${\mathfrak a}_{-1}(1_X){\mathfrak a}_{-2}(\alpha _i)|0\rangle $ ;
-
(iii) $\omega _1= \omega _2 = \omega _3 = {\mathfrak a}_{-3}(1_X)|0\rangle $ .
Moreover, $\langle \omega _1, \omega _2, \omega _3 \rangle _{0, d \beta _3} = 8 \langle \alpha _i, \alpha _j \rangle \, \langle K_X, \alpha _k \rangle $ in case (i), and
in case (ii), where $c_{3, d}$ is the universal constant from (3.16). In case (iii),
The universal constants $c_{3, d}$ appearing in Theorem 1.1 come from (3.16) which governs the $2$ -point genus- $0$ extremal Gromov-Witten invariants of $ X^{[n]}$ via (3.15). The assumption that X is simply connected is intended only to shorten the statement of Theorem 1.1. The proof of Theorem 1.1 uses geometric arguments involving applications of cosection localization theory [Reference Kiem and Li17, Reference Li and Li23] and algebraic manipulations involving the composition law of Gromov-Witten theory and the Heisenberg algebra of Grojnowski [Reference Grojnowski13] and Nakajima [Reference Nakajima34].
As an application of Theorem 1.1, we obtain a direct proof of Ruan’s Cohomological Crepant Resolution Conjecture for the Hilbert-Chow morphism $\rho _3: X^{[3]} \to X^{(3)}$ (we remark that Ruan’s Cohomological Crepant Resolution Conjecture for the Hilbert-Chow morphism $\rho _n: X^{[n]} \to X^{(n)}$ has been proved in [Reference Li and Qin28] for all $n \ge 1$ via a representation theoretic approach).
Corollary 1.2. Let X be a simply connected smooth projective surface. Then Ruan’s Cohomological Crepant Resolution Conjecture for the Hilbert-Chow morphism $\rho _3: X^{[3]} \to X^{(3)}$ holds (i.e., the Chen-Ruan cohomology ring of $X^{(3)}$ is isomorphic to the quantum corrected cohomology ring of $ X^{[3]}$ ).
We refer to the proof of Corollary 4.11 (= Corollary 1.2) for the precise statement of Ruan’s Cohomological Crepant Resolution Conjecture for the Hilbert-Chow morphism $\rho _n: X^{[n]} \to X^{(n)}$ .
Next, we consider the genus- $1$ extremal Gromov-Witten invariants of $ X^{[3]}$ . To put our result in perspective, note that all the genus- $1$ extremal Gromov-Witten invariants of $ X^{[n]}$ with $n \ge 2$ can be reduced to $\langle \rangle _{1, d \beta _n}$ . Let $\chi (X)$ be the Euler characteristic of X. We propose the following conjecture for the invariants $\langle \rangle _{1, d \beta _n}$ .
Conjecture 1.3. Let X be a smooth projective surface. Let $n \ge 2$ and $d \ge 1$ . Then there exists a universal polynomial $p_{n, d}(s, t)$ , independent of X, in variables s and t such that $p_{n, d}(s^2, t) \cdot s^2$ has degree n in s and t, and
Indeed, by [Reference Hu, Li and Qin15, Theorem 1.2], Conjecture 1.3 holds for $n=2$ :
(i.e., $p_{2, d}(s, t)$ is the constant polynomial $1/(12d)$ ). When $X = {\mathbb C}^2$ , [Reference Pandharipande and Tseng37, (0.8)] presents a formula for $\langle \rangle _{1, d\beta _2}$ in the equivariant setting. We prove that Conjecture 1.3 holds for $n=3$ and $d \ge 1$ as well (see Lemma 5.1):
where $a_d$ and $b_d$ are universal constants depending only on d. A major part of our paper is to determine the universal constants $a_d$ and $b_d$ .
Theorem 1.4. Let X be a smooth projective surface. Let $d \ge 1$ , and let $f_d$ be the constant defined in Lemma 5.10. Then, $\langle \rangle _{1, d\beta _3}$ is equal to
where $\delta = (d_1, d_2) \vdash d$ denotes a length- $2$ partition of d.
Using the definition of $f_d$ in Lemma 5.10, one easily computes that $f_1 = 7/24$ (see also Example 5.11). However, for a general $d \ge 1$ , it is unclear how to simplify the definition of $f_d$ presented in Lemma 5.10. Note from (1.2) that to prove Theorem 1.4, it suffices to calculate $a_d$ and $b_d$ when X is a smooth projective toric surface. When X is a smooth projective toric surface, the torus
acts on X with finitely many fixed points $x_i, 1 \le i \le \chi (X)$ , which are the origins of the local affine charts $U_i \cong {\mathbb C} ^2, 1 \le i \le \chi (X)$ . The induced ${\mathbb T}$ -action on $ X^{[3]}$ has finitely many fixed points and finitely many ${\mathbb T}$ -invariant curves contracted by the Hilbert-Chow morphism. We then utilize the virtual localization formulas of Gromov-Witten theory ([Reference Graber and Pandharipande12, Reference Kontsevich and Manin20] for the general setting and [Reference Edidin, Li and Qin8, Reference Liu and Sheshmani30] for our present setting of $ X^{[3]}$ ). In the end, we reduce the computation of $\langle \rangle _{1, d\beta _3}$ to a certain summation $\sum _{\Gamma \in {{\mathcal T}}_{d,i}} - \sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal S}_{d,i, i}}$ over the local chart $U_i$ , in terms of stable graphs $\Gamma $ . To make our introduction here shorter, we refter to (5.13), (5.19) and (5.20) for notations and details. Next, we prove a reduction lemma (Lemma 5.4) which asserts that $\sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d,i}} - \sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal S}_{d,i, i}}$ over the local chart $U_i \cong {\mathbb C} ^2$ is of the form
where $w_i$ and $z_i$ are the weights for the torus action on $U_i$ , and $a_d \in {\mathbb Q}$ is independent of i and X and depends only on d. This key reduction lemma implies that when evaluating $\sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d,i}} - \sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal S}_{d,i, i}}$ , we can ignore the stable graphs $\Gamma \in {\mathcal S}_{d,i, i}$ with more than $2$ edges (see Lemma 5.6) and the stable graphs $\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d,i}$ with more than $5$ edges (see Lemma 5.9 for precise statements).
We remark that our reduction lemma (Lemma 5.4) may not be valid if one is only interested in calculating the analogous summation $\sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d}}$ , in the equivariant setting, for the Hilbert scheme $( {\mathbb C} ^2)^{[n]}$ . The reason is that in this new setting, the analogous summation $\sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal S}_{d,i, i}}$ does not arise, and thus $\sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d}}$ cannot partially cancel with $\sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal S}_{d,i, i}}$ to simplify the computations. We refer to the related discussions on [Reference Pandharipande and Tseng37, p. 8] following [Reference Pandharipande and Tseng37, Theorem 5].
As for Conjecture 1.3 with $n> 3$ , there are two possible approaches. The first one is to use the standard decomposition $\varphi = (\varphi _1, \ldots , \varphi _{\ell })$ from [Reference Li and Li23] (see (3.13)) associated to a genus- $1$ extremal stable map $\varphi : C \to X^{[n]}$ , as in the proof of Lemma 5.1 which is only for $ X^{[3]}$ . Intuitively, the standard decomposition splits the Hilbert scheme $ X^{[n]}$ and the extremal stable map $\varphi : C \to X^{[n]}$ according to the support of $\varphi (C)$ . However, complication arises when at least two of the maps $\varphi _1, \ldots , \varphi _{\ell }$ are not constant. The second approach to Conjecture 1.3 is to utilize the standard versus reduced method of Zinger, Vakil and Zinger, J. Li and Zinger, and Coates and Manolache (see [Reference Coates and Manolache6, Reference Li and Zinger26, Reference Vakil and Zinger40, Reference Zinger41, Reference Zinger42] and the references therein), which transfers the computation of the standard Gromov-Witten invariants $\langle \rangle _{1, d\beta _n}$ to those of the reduced Gromov-Witten invariants. Roughly speaking, this approach splits the moduli space of genus- $1$ extremal stable maps into the main component (which gives rise to the reduced Gromov-Witten invariants) and the ‘ghost’ components (which are related to the genus- $0$ extremal Gromov-Witten invariants). A starting point might be to try the cases when both $n> 3$ and $d \ge 1$ are small.
Finally, the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 contains a brief introduction to Gromov-Witten theory. Section 3 presents some background materials of the Hilbert schemes of points on surfaces, including the Heisenberg algebra of Grojnowski [Reference Grojnowski13] and Nakajima [Reference Nakajima34], Lehn’s boundary operator [Reference Lehn21], and their $1$ -point and $2$ -point genus- $0$ extremal Gromov-Witten invariants [Reference Li and Li23, Reference Li and Qin27]. Theorem 1.1 and Theorem 1.4 are proved in Section 4 and Section 5, respectively.
2 Stable maps and Gromov-Witten invariants
Let Y be a smooth projective variety. A k-pointed stable map to Y consists of a complete nodal curve D with k distinct ordered smooth points $p_1, \ldots , p_k$ and a morphism $\mu : D \to Y$ such that the data $(\mu , D, p_1, \ldots , p_k)$ has only finitely many automorphisms. In this case, the stable map is denoted by $[\mu : (D; p_1, \ldots , p_k) \to Y]$ . For a fixed homology class $\beta \in H_2(Y, \mathbb Z)$ , let $\overline {\mathfrak M}_{g, k}(Y, \beta )$ be the coarse moduli space parameterizing all the stable maps $[\mu : (D; p_1, \ldots , p_k) \to Y]$ such that $\mu _*[D] = \beta $ and the arithmetic genus of D is g. Then, we have the i-th evaluation map:
defined by $\mathrm {ev}_i([\mu : (D; p_1, \ldots , p_k) \to Y]) = \mu (p_i) \in Y$ . It is known [Reference Behrend1, Reference Behrend and Fantechi2, Reference Fulton and Pandharipande11, Reference Li and Tian24, Reference Li and Tian25] that the coarse moduli space $\overline {\mathfrak M}_{g, k}(Y, \beta )$ is projective and has a virtual fundamental class $[\overline {\mathfrak M}_{g, k}(Y, \beta )]^{\mathrm {vir}} \in A_d(\overline {\mathfrak M}_{g, k}(Y, \beta ))$ where
is the expected complex dimension of $\overline {\mathfrak M}_{g, k}(Y, \beta )$ , and $A_d(\overline {\mathfrak M}_{g, k}(Y, \beta ))$ is the Chow group of d-dimensional cycles in the moduli space $\overline {\mathfrak M}_{g, k}(Y, \beta )$ .
The Gromov-Witten invariants are defined by using the virtual fundamental class $[\overline {\mathfrak M}_{g, k}(Y, \beta )]^{\mathrm {vir}} $ . Recall that an element
is homogeneous if $\gamma \in H^j(Y, {\mathbb C})$ for some j; in this case, we take $|\gamma | = j$ . Let $\gamma _1, \ldots , \gamma _k \in H^*(Y, {\mathbb C})$ such that every $\gamma _i$ is homogeneous and
Then, we have the k-point Gromov-Witten invariant defined by:
The Fundamental Class Axiom of the Gromov-Witten theory asserts that
if either $k+2g \ge 4$ or $\beta \ne 0$ and $k \ge 1$ . The Divisor Axiom states that
if $\gamma _k \in H^2(Y, {\mathbb C} )$ and if either $k+2g \ge 4$ or $\beta \ne 0$ and $k \ge 1$ . A special case of the Composition Law (see the formulas (3.3) and (3.6) in [Reference Kontsevich and Manin20]) states that
where $\gamma _1, \gamma _2, \gamma _3, \gamma _4 \in H^*(Y, {\mathbb C} )$ are cohomology classes of even degrees, $\{ \Delta _a \}_a$ denotes a homogeneous linear basis of $H^*(Y, {\mathbb C} )$ and $\{ \Delta ^a \}_a$ is the linear basis of $H^*(Y, {\mathbb C} )$ dual to $\{ \Delta _a \}_a$ with respect to the standard pairing on $H^*(Y, {\mathbb C} )$ (in the sense that $\langle \Delta _a, \Delta ^b \rangle = \delta _{a, b}$ for all a and b).
3 Hilbert schemes of points on surfaces
In this section, we will review Hilbert schemes of points on surfaces, the Heisenberg algebra actions on the cohomology of these Hilbert schemes constructed by Grojnowski [Reference Grojnowski13] and Nakajima [Reference Nakajima34], and Lehn’s boundary operator [Reference Lehn21]. Moreover, we will recall the $1$ -point and $2$ -point genus- $0$ extremal Gromov-Witten invariants of these Hilbert schemes from [Reference Li and Li23, Reference Li and Qin27].
3.1 Hilbert schemes of points and Heisenberg algebra actions
Let X be a smooth projective complex surface, and let $ X^{[n]}$ be the Hilbert scheme of points in X. An element in $ X^{[n]}$ is represented by a length- $n \ 0$ -dimensional closed subscheme $\xi $ of X. For $\xi \in X^{[n]}$ , let $I_{\xi }$ and $\mathcal O_{\xi }$ be the corresponding sheaf of ideals and structure sheaf, respectively. It is known [Reference Fogarty10, Reference Iarrobino16] that $ X^{[n]}$ is a smooth irreducible variety of dimension $2n$ . The boundary of $ X^{[n]}$ is defined to be
For fixed distinct points $x_1, \ldots , x_{n-1} \in X$ , define the curve
We also regard $\beta _n$ as a homology class in $H_2( X^{[n]}, \mathbb Z )$ . For a subset $Y \subset X$ , define
Sending an element in $ X^{[n]}$ to its support (counting with multiplicities) in the n-th symmetric product $X^{(n)}$ of X, we obtain the Hilbert-Chow morphism
which is a crepant resolution of singularities. A curve in $ X^{[n]}$ is contracted by $\rho _n$ if and only if it is homologous to $d\beta _n$ for some positive integer d.
Grojnowski [Reference Grojnowski13] and Nakajima [Reference Nakajima34] geometrically constructed a Heisenberg algebra action on the cohomology of the Hilbert schemes $ X^{[n]}$ . Denote the Heisenberg operators by $ {\mathfrak a}_m(\alpha )$ where $m \in \mathbb Z $ and $\alpha \in H^*(X, {\mathbb C} )$ . Put
The operators ${\mathfrak a}_m(\alpha ) \in \mathrm {End}(\mathbb H_X)$ satisfy the following commutation relation:
where we have used $\delta _{m,-n}$ to denote $1$ if $m=-n$ and $0$ otherwise. The space ${\mathbb H}_X$ is an irreducible representation of the Heisenberg algebra generated by the operators $ {\mathfrak a}_m(\alpha )$ with the highest weight vector being $|0\rangle = 1 \in H^*(X^{[0]}, {\mathbb C} ) = {\mathbb C} $ . In particular, $H^*( X^{[n]}, {\mathbb C} )$ is the linear span of Heisenberg monomial classes
where $k \ge 0, n_1, \ldots , n_k> 0$ and $\alpha _1, \ldots , \alpha _k \in H^*(X, {\mathbb C} )$ .
Fix closed real cycles $X_1, \ldots , X_k$ of the surface X in general position in the sense that any subset of the $X_i$ ’s meet transversally in the expected dimension. Define
to be the closed subset consisting of all $\xi \in X^{[n]}$ which admit filtrations
with $\ell (\xi _i) = \ell (\xi _{i-1}) + n_i$ and
for $1 \le i \le k$ . Let $ W(n_1, X_1; \ldots; n_k, X_k)^0 \subset W(n_1, X_1; \ldots; n_k, X_k)$ be the open subset consisting of all $\xi \in W(n_1, X_1; \ldots; n_k, X_k)$ such that the points $x_1, \ldots , x_k$ in (3.4) are distinct.
Lemma 3.1 [Reference Qin38, Proposition 3.16].
Let $\ell , k \ge 0$ , $s_i \ge 0$ ( $1 \le i \le \ell $ ), $n_i> 0$ ( $1 \le i \le k$ ). Let $\alpha _1, \ldots , \alpha _k \in \displaystyle {\bigoplus _{i=1}^4 H^i(X, {\mathbb C} )}$ be represented by the cycles $X_1, \ldots , X_k \subset X$ , respectively, such that $X_1, \ldots , X_k$ are in general position. Then,
is represented by the closure of
It follows that $1_{ X^{[n]}} = 1/n! \cdot {\mathfrak a}_{-1}(1_X)^n|0\rangle \in H^0( X^{[n]}, {\mathbb C} )$ , where $1_X$ denotes the fundamental cohomology class of the surface X, and
where x denotes the fundamental cohomology class of a point $x \in X$ . For simplicity, we do not distinguish a homology class and its Poincaré dual.
Let $\tau _2: X \to X^2$ be the diagonal embedding and $\tau _{2*}: H^*(X, {\mathbb C} ) \to H^*(X^2, {\mathbb C} )$ be the induced map. For $\alpha \in H^*(X, {\mathbb C} )$ and $m_1, m_2 \in \mathbb Z $ , define
if $\tau _{2*}\alpha = \sum _i \alpha _{i,1} \otimes \alpha _{i,2}$ under the Künneth decomposition of $H^*(X^2, {\mathbb C} )$ . For $n \in \mathbb Z $ and $\alpha \in H^*(X, {\mathbb C} )$ , define the linear operator $\mathfrak L_n(\alpha ) \in \mathrm {End}(\mathbb H_X)$ by
We have the commutation relation
Lehn [Reference Lehn21] defined the boundary operator $ \mathfrak d \in \mathrm {End}(\mathbb H_X)$ by putting
for $\gamma _n \in H^*( X^{[n]}, {\mathbb C} )$ . For a linear operator $\mathfrak f \in \mathrm {End}(\mathbb H_X)$ , define its derivative $\mathfrak f'$ by
A fundamental result proved in [Reference Lehn21] states that
3.2 $1$ -point and $2$ -point genus- $0$ extremal Gromov-Witten invariants
In this subsection, let X be a simply connected smooth projective surface. We start with the $1$ -point genus- $0$ extremal Gromov-Witten invariants of $ X^{[n]}$ .
Lemma 3.2 [Reference Li and Qin27, Theorem 3.5].
Let X be a simply connected smooth projective surface. Let $n \ge 2$ , $d\ge 1$ and $\gamma \in H^*( X^{[n]}, {\mathbb C} )$ be a Heisenberg monomial class (3.3). Then, $\langle \gamma \rangle _{0, d\beta _n}=0$ unless $\gamma = {\mathfrak a}_{-2}(\alpha ){\mathfrak a}_{-1}(x)^{n-2}|0\rangle $ for some $\alpha \in H^2(X, {\mathbb C} )$ . Moreover, if $\gamma = {\mathfrak a}_{-2}(\alpha ){\mathfrak a}_{-1}(x)^{n-2}|0\rangle $ for some $\alpha \in H^2(X, {\mathbb C} )$ , then
The $2$ -point genus- $0$ extremal Gromov-Witten invariants of $ X^{[n]}$ have been studied in [Reference Li and Li23] via cosection localizations [Reference Kiem and Li17]. By abusing notations, denote
by $\varphi $ . Since $\varphi _*[C] = d \beta _n$ , the composition $\rho _n \circ \varphi $ is a constant map. Let
be the induced map. If $\mathrm {Spt}(\varphi ) = \sum _{i=1}^{\ell } n_i x_i \in X^{(n)}$ where $x_1, \ldots , x_{\ell }$ are distinct, then the morphism $\varphi $ factors through the product of punctual Hilbert schemes:
where $\varphi _i$ is a morphism from C to $M_{n_i}(x_i)$ . The collection
is defined to be the standard decomposition of $\varphi $ , and the point $x_i$ is called the support of $\varphi _i$ . Note that the collection $\{\varphi _1, \ldots , \varphi _{\ell } \}$ is unique up to the ordering of the $\varphi _i$ ’s. Fix a meromorphic section $\theta $ of $\mathcal O_X(K_X)$ . Let $D_0$ and $D_{\infty }$ be the vanishing and pole divisors of $\theta $ , respectively.
Lemma 3.3 [Reference Li and Li23, Proposition 3.3].
Let $\Lambda _{\theta } \subset \overline {\mathfrak M}_{g, k}( X^{[n]}, d \beta _n)$ be the subset consisting of the stable maps $\varphi = (\varphi _1, \ldots , \varphi _{\ell }) \in \overline {\mathfrak M}_{g, k}( X^{[n]}, d \beta _n)$ such that for each i, either $\varphi _i$ is a constant map or the support $x_i = \mathrm {Spt}(\varphi _i)$ lies in $D_0 \cup D_{\infty }$ . Then the virtual fundamental class $[\overline {\mathfrak M}_{g, k}( X^{[n]}, d \beta _n)]^{\mathrm {vir}} $ is supported in $\Lambda _{\theta }$ .
Let $(\mu ^1, \mu ^2, \mu ^3)$ denote a triple of partitions with $|\mu ^1| + |\mu ^2| + |\mu ^3| = n$ . Let $r = \ell (\mu ^1)$ , $s = \ell (\mu ^2)$ and $t = \ell (\mu ^3)$ be the lengths. For cohomology classes $\mathbf {c}_1, \ldots , \mathbf {c}_s \in H^2(X, {\mathbb C} )$ , define the class $A_{\mathbf {c}}^{\mu } \in H^*( X^{[n]}, {\mathbb C} )$ by
For a part $\mu _j^2$ of $\mu ^2$ , let $A_{\mathbf {c}}^{\mu - \mu _j^2}$ be the cohomology class in $H^*(X^{[n - \mu _j^2]}, {\mathbb C} )$ obtained from $A_{\mathbf {c}}^{\mu }$ with the factor ${\mathfrak a}_{-\mu _j^2}(\mathbf {c}_j)$ deleted. We similarly define $A_{\mathbf {c}}^{\mu - \mu _i^3}$ .
The following lemma summarizes some of the main results in [Reference Li and Li23] and computes the $2$ -point genus- $0$ extremal Gromov-Witten invariants of $ X^{[n]}$ .
Lemma 3.4 [Reference Li and Li23].
Let $d \ge 1$ . Assume that $\big \langle A_{\mathbf {e}}^{\lambda }, A_{\mathbf {c}}^{\mu } \big \rangle _{0, d \beta _n} \ne 0$ . Then,
where $\delta =0$ or $1$ . If $\delta =0$ , then $\lambda ^3 = \mu ^1$ , and there exists an integer $\ell = \mu _i^3 = \lambda _j^2$ for some i and j such that the partition $\lambda ^1$ is obtained from $\mu ^3$ with $\ell $ deleted, and the partition $\mu ^2$ is obtained from $\lambda ^2$ with $\ell $ deleted; moreover,
where the universal constant $c_{\ell , d}$ is defined by the equation
4 Genus- $0$ extremal Gromov-Witten invariants of $ X^{[3]}$
In this section, X is a simply connected smooth projective surface. We will study the genus- $0$ extremal Gromov-Witten invariants $\langle \omega _1, \ldots , \omega _k \rangle _{0, d\beta _3}$ of $ X^{[3]}$ . Put
for simplicity. In view of the Fundamental Class Axiom (2.5), the Divisor Axiom (2.6) and the dimension constraint (2.3), the genus- $0$ extremal Gromov-Witten invariants of $ X^{[3]}$ are reduced to the invariants
with $\omega _1, \omega _2, \omega _3 \in H^4( X^{[3]}, {\mathbb C} )$ . The invariants $\langle \tilde \omega _1 \rangle _{0, d}$ and $\langle \tilde \omega _1, \tilde \omega _2 \rangle _{0, d}$ have been dealt with by Lemma 3.2 and Lemma 3.4, respectively. Therefore, it remains to calculate the $3$ -point invariants $\langle \omega _1, \omega _2, \omega _3 \rangle _{0, d}$ with $\omega _1, \omega _2, \omega _3 \in H^4( X^{[3]}, {\mathbb C} )$ .
To begin with, we fix a linear basis of $H^*( X^{[3]}, {\mathbb C} )$ which allows us to apply the composition law (2.7). Let $\{\alpha _1, \ldots , \alpha _s \}$ be a linear basis of $H^2(X, {\mathbb C} )$ . By (3.3), a linear basis ${\mathfrak B}^2$ of $H^2( X^{[3]}, {\mathbb C} )$ consists of the cohomology classes
where $1 \le i \le s$ , a linear basis ${\mathfrak B}^{10}$ of $H^{10}( X^{[3]}, {\mathbb C} )$ consists of
where $1 \le i \le s$ , and a linear basis ${\mathfrak B}^8$ of $H^{8}( X^{[3]}, {\mathbb C} )$ consists of the classes
where $1 \le i \le j \le s$ . A linear basis ${\mathfrak B}^4$ of $H^{4}( X^{[3]}, {\mathbb C} )$ consists of the classes
where $1 \le i \le j \le s$ , and a linear basis ${\mathfrak B}^6$ of $H^{6}( X^{[3]}, {\mathbb C} )$ consists of
where $1 \le i, j' \le j \le k \le s$ . The point class in $H^{12}( X^{[3]}, {\mathbb C} )$ is ${\mathfrak a}_{-1}(x)^3 |0\rangle $ .
Definition 4.1. Let X be a simply connected smooth projective surface. Let $\{\alpha _1, \ldots , \alpha _s \}$ be a linear basis of $H^2(X, {\mathbb C} )$ . Define $\{ \Delta _a \}$ to be the linear basis of the total cohomology $H^*( X^{[3]}, {\mathbb C} )$ that consists of
Let $\omega _1, \omega _2, \omega _3 \in {\mathfrak B}^4 \subset H^4( X^{[3]}, {\mathbb C} )$ . The next lemma identifies all the unordered triples $(\omega _1, \omega _2, \omega _3)$ such that $\langle \omega _1, \omega _2, \omega _3 \rangle _{0, d}$ may not be $0$ . The idea is to use geometric argument involving the reduction Lemma 3.3. In order to apply Lemma 3.3, we fix a meromorphic section $\theta $ of the canonical line bundle $\mathcal O_X(K_X)$ and let $D_0$ and $D_{\infty }$ be the vanishing and pole divisors of $\theta $ , respectively.
Lemma 4.2. Let $d \ge 1$ and $\omega _1, \omega _2, \omega _3 \in {\mathfrak B}^4 \subset H^4( X^{[3]}, {\mathbb C} )$ . Then
if the unordered triple $(\omega _1, \omega _2, \omega _3)$ is not one of the following:
-
(i) $\Big ({\mathfrak a}_{-2}(1_X){\mathfrak a}_{-1}(\alpha _i)|0\rangle , \, {\mathfrak a}_{-2}(1_X){\mathfrak a}_{-1}(\alpha _j)|0\rangle , \, {\mathfrak a}_{-1}(1_X){\mathfrak a}_{-2}(\alpha _k)|0\rangle \Big )$ ;
-
(ii) $\omega _1= \omega _2 = {\mathfrak a}_{-3}(1_X)|0\rangle $ , and $\omega _3 = {\mathfrak a}_{-2}(1_X){\mathfrak a}_{-1}(\alpha _i)|0\rangle $ or ${\mathfrak a}_{-1}(1_X){\mathfrak a}_{-2}(\alpha _i)|0\rangle $ ;
-
(iii) $\omega _1= \omega _2 = \omega _3 = {\mathfrak a}_{-3}(1_X)|0\rangle $ .
Proof. We will only prove (4.7) when the triple $(\omega _1, \omega _2, \omega _3)$ is
since the proof of (4.7) for other triples is similar.
To show that $\langle \omega _1, \omega _2, \omega _3 \rangle _{0, d} = 0$ , let $C_i, C_j, C_k \subset X$ be real $2$ -dimensional cycles representing the cohomology classes $\alpha _i, \alpha _j, \alpha _k \in H^2(X, {\mathbb C} )$ , respectively, such that $C_i, C_j, C_k, D_0, D_{\infty }$ are in general position. By Lemma 3.1, the classes
are geometrically represented by the closures $W_1, W_2, W_3$ of the subsets
respectively. By Lemma 3.3, it suffices to prove that
Assume $[\varphi : (\Sigma; \tilde p_1, \tilde p_2, \tilde p_3) \to X^{[3]}] \in \Lambda _{\theta } \cap \mathrm {ev}_1^{-1}(W_1) \cap \mathrm {ev}_2^{-1}(W_2) \cap \mathrm {ev}_3^{-1}(W_3)$ . Since $[\varphi : (\Sigma; \tilde p_1, \tilde p_2, \tilde p_3) \to X^{[3]}] \in \mathrm {ev}_1^{-1}(W_1)$ and $\rho _3(\varphi (\Sigma ))$ is a single point in $X^{(3)}$ , we see from (4.8) that $\rho _3(\varphi (\Sigma ))$ is of the form
for some (possibly the same) points $x_1, x_2\in X$ such that $x_2 \in C_i$ . Since
we must have $x_1 \in C_j$ . Similarly, $x_1 \in C_k$ . So $x_1 \in C_j \cap C_k$ . Since $C_i, C_j, C_k, D_0, D_{\infty }$ are in general position, $x_1 \not \in C_i \cup D_0 \cup D_{\infty }$ and $x_1 \ne x_2$ . Let $\varphi = (\varphi _1, \varphi _2, \cdots )$ be the standard decomposition of $\varphi $ . Without loss of generality, we assume that $\varphi _1$ is not a constant map. By Lemma 3.3, $\mathrm {Spt}(\varphi _1) \in D_0 \cup D_{\infty }$ . So $x_2 = \mathrm {Spt}(\varphi _1) \in D_0 \cup D_{\infty }$ and $x_2 \in C_i \cap (D_0 \cup D_{\infty })$ . Therefore, $\varphi _1: \Sigma \to X$ is the constant map $\varphi _1(\Sigma ) = x_2$ , contradicting the assumption that $\varphi _1$ is not constant.
In the rest of this section, we will compute $\langle \omega _1, \omega _2, \omega _3 \rangle _{0, d}$ when the unordered triple $(\omega _1, \omega _2, \omega _3)$ is one of those listed in Lemma 4.2 (i), (ii) and (iii). Lemma 4.3 below deals with the unordered triple in Lemma 4.2 (i), and its proof uses a geometric argument similar to the proof of Lemma 4.2.
Lemma 4.3. Let $\{\alpha _1, \ldots , \alpha _s \}$ be a linear basis of $H^2(X, {\mathbb C} )$ . Let $d \ge 1$ and the unordered triple $(\omega _1, \omega _2, \omega _3)$ be from Lemma 4.2 (i). Then,
Proof. Let $C_i, C_j, C_k \subset X$ be real $2$ -dimensional cycles representing the cohomology classes $\alpha _i, \alpha _j, \alpha _k$ , respectively, such that $C_i, C_j, C_k, D_0, D_{\infty }$ are in general position. By Lemma 3.1, the cohomology classes
are geometrically represented by the closures $W_1, W_2, W_3$ of the subsets
respectively. Let $[\varphi : (\Sigma; \tilde p_1, \tilde p_2, \tilde p_3) \to X^{[3]}] \in \Lambda _{\theta } \cap \mathrm {ev}_1^{-1}(W_1) \cap \mathrm {ev}_2^{-1}(W_2) \cap \mathrm {ev}_3^{-1}(W_3)$ . Since $[\varphi : (\Sigma; \tilde p_1, \tilde p_2, \tilde p_3) \to X^{[3]}] \in \mathrm {ev}_3^{-1}(W_3)$ and $\rho _3(\varphi (\Sigma ))$ is a single point in $X^{(3)}$ , we see from (4.12) that $\rho _3(\varphi (\Sigma ))$ is of the form
for some (possibly the same) points $x_1, x_2\in X$ such that $x_2 \in C_k$ . By Lemma 3.3, since $[\varphi : (\Sigma; \tilde p_1, \tilde p_2, \tilde p_3) \to X^{[3]}] \in \Lambda _{\theta }$ and $\varphi $ is not a constant map, $x_2 \in D_0 \cup D_{\infty }$ . So $x_2 \in C_k \cap (D_0 \cup D_{\infty })$ . Since $C_i, C_j, C_k, D_0$ and $D_{\infty }$ are in general position, $x_2 \not \in C_i \cup C_j$ . Since $[\varphi : (\Sigma; \tilde p_1, \tilde p_2, \tilde p_3) \to X^{[3]}] \in \mathrm {ev}_1^{-1}(W_1) \cap \mathrm {ev}_2^{-1}(W_2)$ , we see from (4.13) that $x_1 \in C_i \cap C_j$ . It follows that $x_1 \ne x_2$ , and the standard decomposition of $\varphi $ (see (3.13)) is of the form $\varphi = (\varphi _1, \varphi _2)$ with $\mathrm {Spt}(\varphi _1) = x_1$ and $\mathrm {Spt}(\varphi _2) = 2x_2$ . In particular, $\varphi _1: \Sigma \to X$ is the constant map sending $\Sigma $ to $x_1$ . Hence, we obtain
by splitting off the factors ${\mathfrak a}_{-1}(\alpha _i), {\mathfrak a}_{-1}(\alpha _j), {\mathfrak a}_{-1}(1_X)$ from the three classes in (4.11), respectively. It is known (see [Reference Qin38, (1.35)]) that
for $n \ge 2$ . In particular, $\big \langle {\mathfrak a}_{-2}(1_X)|0\rangle , \beta _2 \big \rangle = -2$ . So by the Divisor Axiom (2.6),
Finally, by Lemma 3.2 with $n=2$ , $\big \langle {\mathfrak a}_{-2}(\alpha _k)|0\rangle \big \rangle _{0, d} = 2 \langle K_X, \alpha _k \rangle /d^2$ . Therefore,
To handle the unordered triples $(\omega _1, \omega _2, \omega _3)$ listed in Lemma 4.2 (ii), we will now prove three technical lemmas. For simplicity, in the rest of this section, we let
Recall from (4.14) that $\langle B_3, \beta _3 \rangle = -2$ . It follows that
The self-intersection $c_1^2$ via Heisenberg operators is given by the lemma below.
Lemma 4.4. Let $c_1 = -B_3/2$ . Then, $c_1^2$ is equal to
Proof. Recall Lehn’s boundary operator $\mathfrak d$ from (3.10). By definition,
Moving $\mathfrak d$ all the way to the right and using $\mathfrak d |0\rangle = 0$ , we get
By (3.11), ${\mathfrak a}_{-2}'(1_X) = -2 \mathfrak L_{-2}(1_X) + {\mathfrak a}_{-2}(K_X)$ . So by (3.9) and (3.8),
Similarly, ${\mathfrak a}_{-1}'(1_X)|0\rangle = -\mathfrak L_{-1}(1_X)|0\rangle = 0$ . Therefore, $c_1^2$ is equal to
Since X is simply connected, if $\{\alpha _1, \ldots , \alpha _s \}$ is a linear basis of $H^2(X, {\mathbb C} )$ , then
for some $b_{j, k} \in {\mathbb C} $ , via the Künneth decomposition of $H^*(X^2, {\mathbb C} )$ .
In the next two lemmas, we will compute certain special $1$ -point and $2$ -point genus- $0$ extremal Gromov-Witten invariants which will appear in our applications of the composition law (2.7) and involve the class $\omega = {\mathfrak a}_{-3}(1_X)|0\rangle $ .
Lemma 4.5. Let X be a simply connected smooth projective surface. Let $d \ge 1$ , $\omega = {\mathfrak a}_{-3}(1_X)|0\rangle $ and $\tilde \omega = {\mathfrak a}_{-1}(1_X){\mathfrak a}_{-2}(\alpha )|0\rangle $ for some $\alpha \in H^2(X, {\mathbb C} )$ . Then,
Proof. Let $\{\alpha _1, \ldots , \alpha _s \}$ be a linear basis of $H^2(X, {\mathbb C} )$ . By (4.16) and (4.17),
In view of the linear basis (4.4), ${\mathfrak a}_{-1}(1_X){\mathfrak a}_{-2}(K_X)|0\rangle \cdot \tilde \omega $ is a linear combination of ${\mathfrak a}_{-1}(1_X){\mathfrak a}_{-1}(x)^{2} |0\rangle $ , ${\mathfrak a}_{-1}(\alpha _j){\mathfrak a}_{-1}(\alpha _k) {\mathfrak a}_{-1}(x)|0\rangle $ , ${\mathfrak a}_{-1}(\alpha _j){\mathfrak a}_{-2}(x)|0\rangle $ and ${\mathfrak a}_{-3}(x)|0\rangle $ . Hence, $\langle {\mathfrak a}_{-1}(1_X){\mathfrak a}_{-2}(K_X)|0\rangle \cdot \tilde \omega \rangle _{0, d} = 0$ by Lemma 3.2. Similarly,
whenever $1 \le j, k \le s$ . Note that ${\mathfrak a}_{-1}(1_X)^2{\mathfrak a}_{-1}(x)|0\rangle \cdot \tilde \omega = 2{\mathfrak a}_{-1}(x){\mathfrak a}_{-2}(\alpha )|0\rangle $ . Combining with (4.19) and Lemma 3.2, we conclude that
As in the proof of Lemma 4.4, using (3.11) and (3.9), we get
where $\gamma $ is a term satisfying $\langle \gamma \rangle _{0, d}=0$ . By Lemma 3.2 again,
Lemma 4.6. Let X be simply connected. Let $d \ge 1$ , $c_1 = -B_3/2$ , $\omega = {\mathfrak a}_{-3}(1_X)|0\rangle $ and $\tilde \omega = {\mathfrak a}_{-1}(1_X){\mathfrak a}_{-2}(\alpha )|0\rangle $ for some $\alpha \in H^2(X, {\mathbb C} )$ . Then,
-
(i) $\langle c_1 \omega , \tilde \omega \rangle _{0, d} = -12 \langle K_X, \alpha \rangle /d$ .
-
(ii) $\langle \omega , c_1 \tilde \omega \rangle _{0, d} = -2 \,\, \langle K_X, \alpha \rangle \,\, c_{3, d}$ where $c_{3, d}$ is from (3.16).
-
(iii) $\langle c_1 \omega , \omega \rangle _{0, d} = 3K_X^2 \,\, c_{3, d}$ .
Proof. (i) Since $c_1 \omega = \mathfrak d {\mathfrak a}_{-3}(1_X)|0\rangle $ , we see from (3.11) that
By (3.8), $\mathfrak L_{-3}(1_X)|0\rangle = - {\mathfrak a}_{-1} {\mathfrak a}_{-2}(\tau _{2*}1_X)|0\rangle $ . Thus, we have
By Lemma 3.4, $\big \langle {\mathfrak a}_{-3}(K_X) |0\rangle , \tilde \omega \big \rangle _{0, d} = 0$ . Therefore,
By (4.17), Lemma 3.4 and $c_{2, d} = -4/d$ , we obtain
(ii) Similarly, by (3.11) and (3.8), we conclude that
where $\gamma $ is a term satisfying $\langle \omega , \gamma \rangle _{0, d}=0$ . By Lemma 3.4,
(iii) We see from (4.20) that $\langle c_1 \omega , \omega \rangle _{0, d}$ is equal to
By (4.17) and Lemma 3.4, we have $\big \langle {\mathfrak a}_{-1} {\mathfrak a}_{-2}(\tau _{2*}1_X)|0\rangle , {\mathfrak a}_{-3}(1_X)|0\rangle \big \rangle _{0, d} = 0$ and $ \big \langle {\mathfrak a}_{-3}(K_X)|0\rangle , {\mathfrak a}_{-3}(1_X)|0\rangle \big \rangle _{0, d} = K_X^2 \,\, c_{3, d}. $ Hence, $\langle c_1 \omega , \omega \rangle _{0, d} = 3K_X^2 \,\, c_{3, d}$ .
Our next proposition determines the invariant $\langle \omega _1, \omega _2, \omega _3 \rangle _{0, d}$ when the unordered triple $(\omega _1, \omega _2, \omega _3)$ is from Lemma 4.2 (ii). Its proof involves the composition law (2.7) and the linear basis $\{ \Delta _a \}$ from (4.6).
Proposition 4.7. Let $\{\alpha _1, \ldots , \alpha _s \}$ be a linear basis of $H^2(X, {\mathbb C} )$ . Let $d \ge 1$ and $\omega _1 = \omega _2 = {\mathfrak a}_{-3}(1_X)|0\rangle $ . Let $\omega _3 = {\mathfrak a}_{-2}(1_X){\mathfrak a}_{-1}(\alpha _i)|0\rangle $ or ${\mathfrak a}_{-1}(1_X){\mathfrak a}_{-2}(\alpha _i)|0\rangle $ . Then,
where $c_{3, d}$ is the universal constant from (3.16).
Proof. The proof of (4.21) for $\omega _3 = {\mathfrak a}_{-2}(1_X){\mathfrak a}_{-1}(\alpha _i)|0\rangle $ is similar to the proof of (4.21) for $\omega _3 = {\mathfrak a}_{-1}(1_X){\mathfrak a}_{-2}(\alpha _i)|0\rangle $ . So we will only prove
for $\omega _3 = {\mathfrak a}_{-1}(1_X){\mathfrak a}_{-2}(\alpha _i)|0\rangle $ Let $c_1 = -B_3/2$ . Apply the composition law (2.7) to
We will prove (4.22) by comparing both sides of (2.7).
First of all, the left-hand side of (2.7) is equal to
By (4.16) and Lemma 4.2, $\langle c_1^2, \omega _2, \omega _3 \rangle _{0, d} = Q$ . Since $\langle c_1, \beta _3 \rangle = 1$ by (4.15), we get
in view of (2.6). By Lemma 3.2, $\langle \Delta _a \rangle _{0, d_1} \ne 0$ only when $\Delta _a = {\mathfrak a}_{-2}(\alpha _j){\mathfrak a}_{-1}(x)|0\rangle $ for some j. If $\Delta _a = {\mathfrak a}_{-2}(\alpha _j){\mathfrak a}_{-1}(x)|0\rangle $ , then we see from (4.4) that $\Delta ^a$ is a linear combination of the classes ${\mathfrak a}_{-2}(\alpha _k){\mathfrak a}_{-1}(1_X)|0\rangle $ , $1 \le k \le s$ . So $\langle \Delta ^a, \omega _2, \omega _3 \rangle _{0, d_2} = 0$ by Lemma 4.2. It follows from (4.23) that the left-hand side of (2.7) is equal to $ Q + d^2 \, \langle \omega _2 \omega _3 \rangle _{0, d}. $ By Lemma 4.5, we see that the left-hand side of (2.7) is equal to
Next, the right-hand side of (2.7) is equal to
By Lemma 4.6, we have $\langle c_1 \omega _2, c_1, \omega _3 \rangle _{0, d} = d \langle c_1 \omega _2, \omega _3 \rangle _{0, d} = -12 \langle K_X, \alpha _i \rangle $ and
Therefore, the right-hand side of (2.7) is equal to
By the list (4.5) of the basis ${\mathfrak B}^6$ and Lemma 3.4, $\langle \omega _2, \Delta _a \rangle _{0, d_1} \ne 0$ only if $\Delta _a = {\mathfrak a}_{-3}(\alpha _j)|0\rangle $ for some j with $1 \le j \le s$ . If $\Delta _a = {\mathfrak a}_{-3}(\alpha _j)|0\rangle $ , then $\Delta ^a$ is a linear combination of ${\mathfrak B}^6 - \big \{ {\mathfrak a}_{-2}(1_X){\mathfrak a}_{-1}(x)|0\rangle \big \}$ . So $\langle \Delta ^a, \omega _3 \rangle _{0, d_2} = 0$ by Lemma 3.4 again. By (4.25), the right-hand side of (2.7) is equal to
We are left with the computation of the invariant $\langle \omega _1, \omega _2, \omega _3 \rangle _{0, d}$ when the triple $(\omega _1, \omega _2, \omega _3)$ is from Lemma 4.2 (iii), that is, when $ \omega _1 = \omega _2 = \omega _3 = {\mathfrak a}_{-3}(1_X)|0\rangle. $ This will be done in Proposition 4.9 below. We prove a technical lemma first.
Lemma 4.8. Let X be simply connected. Let $d \ge 1$ and $\omega = {\mathfrak a}_{-3}(1_X)|0\rangle $ . Then,
Proof. Let $\{\alpha _1, \ldots , \alpha _s \}$ be a linear basis of $H^2(X, {\mathbb C} )$ . By (4.19),
The cup products ${\mathfrak a}_{-1}(1_X)^2{\mathfrak a}_{-1}(x)|0\rangle \cdot \omega $ and ${\mathfrak a}_{-1}(1_X){\mathfrak a}_{-1}(\alpha _j) {\mathfrak a}_{-1}(\alpha _k)|0\rangle \cdot \omega $ are scalar multiples of ${\mathfrak a}_{-3}(x)|0\rangle $ . Therefore, we conclude from Lemma 3.2 that
By (4.20), $c_1 \omega = 3 {\mathfrak a}_{-1} {\mathfrak a}_{-2}(\tau _{2*}1_X)|0\rangle + 3 {\mathfrak a}_{-3}(K_X)|0\rangle $ . So
by (4.17), (3.11), (3.9), (3.8) and Lemma 3.2. Similarly, by (4.19) and Lemma 3.2,
By (3.11), (3.9) and (3.8), we see that $\mathfrak d {\mathfrak a}_{-1}(1_X){\mathfrak a}_{-2}(K_X)|0\rangle $ is equal to
Applying (3.11), (3.9), (3.8) and Lemma 3.2 repeatedly, we get
Combining with (4.30), we have $\big \langle \omega \cdot {\mathfrak a}_{-1}(1_X){\mathfrak a}_{-2}(K_X)|0\rangle \big \rangle _{0, d} = -{12K_X^2}/{d^2}.$ Together with (4.28) and (4.29), we obtain $\langle \omega ^2 \rangle _{0, d} = {18K_X^2}/{d^2}$ .
Proposition 4.9. Let X be a simply connected projective surface. Let $d \ge 1$ . Then, $\big \langle {\mathfrak a}_{-3}(1_X)|0\rangle , {\mathfrak a}_{-3}(1_X)|0\rangle , {\mathfrak a}_{-3}(1_X)|0\rangle \big \rangle _{0, d}$ is equal to
where $c_{3, d}$ is the universal constant from (3.16).
Proof. For simplicity, let $\omega = {\mathfrak a}_{-3}(1_X)|0\rangle $ and $Q' = \big \langle \omega , \omega , \omega \big \rangle _{0, d}$ . Our idea to compute $Q'$ is the same as in the proof of Proposition 4.7. Let $c_1 = -B_3/2$ . We apply the composition law (2.7) to $\gamma _1 = \gamma _2 = c_1$ and $\gamma _3 = \gamma _4 = \omega $ .
First of all, notice that the left-hand-side of (2.7) is equal to
By (4.16), Lemma 4.2 and Proposition 4.7, we have $ \langle c_1^2, \omega , \omega \rangle _{0, d} = Q' + K_X^2 \, d c_{3,d}. $ By (2.6) and Lemma 4.8, we get $\langle c_1, c_1, \omega ^2 \rangle _{0, d} = d^2 \langle \omega ^2 \rangle _{0, d} = 18K_X^2$ . Next, note from (4.3) and (4.4) that if $\Delta _a = {\mathfrak a}_{-2}(\alpha _i){\mathfrak a}_{-1}(x)|0\rangle $ , then $ \Delta ^a = -{1}/{2} \cdot {\mathfrak a}_{-2}(\alpha ^i){\mathfrak a}_{-1}(1_X)|0\rangle $ where $\{ \alpha ^1, \ldots , \alpha ^s \} \subset H^2(X, {\mathbb C} )$ is the dual basis of $\{ \alpha _1, \ldots , \alpha _s \}$ with respect to the pairing of X. So by Lemma 3.2 and Proposition 4.7, we obtain
Since $\sum _{i=1}^s \langle K_X, \alpha _i \rangle \cdot \langle K_X, \alpha ^i \rangle = K_X^2$ , we conclude that
In summary, we see that the left-hand side of (2.7) is equal to
Next, the right-hand side of (2.7) is equal to
by Lemma 4.6 (iii). If $\Delta _a = {\mathfrak a}_{-3}(\alpha _i)|0\rangle $ , then $\Delta ^a = {1}/{3} \cdot {\mathfrak a}_{-3}(\alpha ^i)|0\rangle .$ Therefore,
by Lemma 3.4. In summary, we see that the right-hand side of (2.7) is equal to
The results in this section are summarized into a theorem.
Theorem 4.10. Let X be a simply connected smooth projective surface. Assume that $\{\alpha _1, \ldots , \alpha _s \}$ is a linear basis of $H^2(X, {\mathbb C} )$ , and let ${\mathfrak B}^4$ stand for the linear basis of $H^{4}( X^{[3]}, {\mathbb C} )$ from (4.4). Let $d \ge 1$ and $\omega _1, \omega _2, \omega _3 \in {\mathfrak B}^4$ . Then,
if the unordered triple $(\omega _1, \omega _2, \omega _3)$ is not one of the following four cases:
-
(i) $\Big ({\mathfrak a}_{-2}(1_X){\mathfrak a}_{-1}(\alpha _i)|0\rangle , {\mathfrak a}_{-2}(1_X){\mathfrak a}_{-1}(\alpha _j)|0\rangle , {\mathfrak a}_{-1}(1_X){\mathfrak a}_{-2}(\alpha _k)|0\rangle \Big )$ ;
-
(ii) $\omega _1= \omega _2 = {\mathfrak a}_{-3}(1_X)|0\rangle $ , and $\omega _3 = {\mathfrak a}_{-2}(1_X){\mathfrak a}_{-1}(\alpha _i)|0\rangle $ or ${\mathfrak a}_{-1}(1_X){\mathfrak a}_{-2}(\alpha _i)|0\rangle $ ;
-
(iii) $\omega _1= \omega _2 = \omega _3 = {\mathfrak a}_{-3}(1_X)|0\rangle $ .
Moreover, $\langle \omega _1, \omega _2, \omega _3 \rangle _{0, d \beta _3} = 8 \langle \alpha _i, \alpha _j \rangle \, \langle K_X, \alpha _k \rangle $ in case (i), and
in case (ii), where $c_{3, d}$ is the universal constant from (3.16). In case (iii),
Via a representation theoretic approach, [Reference Li and Qin28] presents a complicated proof of Ruan’s Cohomological Crepant Resolution Conjecture for the Hilbert-Chow morphism $\rho _n: X^{[n]} \to X^{(n)}$ for all $n \ge 1$ . As an application of Theorem 4.10 (together with the results in [Reference Li and Li23, Reference Li and Qin27] about the $1$ -point and $2$ -point genus- $0$ extremal Gromov-Witten invariants of $ X^{[n]}$ ), we now give a direct (but tedious) proof of this conjecture when $n=3$ .
Corollary 4.11. Let X be a simply connected smooth projective surface. Then Ruan’s Cohomological Crepant Resolution Conjecture for the Hilbert-Chow morphism $\rho _3: X^{[3]} \to X^{(3)}$ holds (i.e., the Chen-Ruan cohomology ring of $X^{(3)}$ is isomorphic to the quantum corrected cohomology ring of $ X^{[3]}$ ).
Proof. First of all, we briefly recall from [Reference Ruan39] and [Reference Qin38, Chapter 16] that the Cohomological Crepant Resolution Conjecture for $\rho _n: X^{[n]} \to X^{(n)}$ asserts that there exists a ring isomorphism
where $H_{CR}^*(X^{(n)}, {\mathbb C} )$ is the Chen-Ruan cohomology of $X^{(n)}$ , and $H_{\rho _n}^*( X^{[n]}, {\mathbb C} )$ is the cohomology $H^*( X^{[n]}, {\mathbb C} )$ together with the quantum corrected ring product $\cdot _{\rho _n}$ . For $w_1, w_2 \in H^*( X^{[n]}, {\mathbb C} )$ , the product $w_1 \cdot _{\rho _n} w_2$ is defined by putting
where $w_3 \in H^*( X^{[n]}, {\mathbb C} )$ , $\langle \cdot , \cdot \rangle $ on the left-hand side is the pairing on $H^*( X^{[n]}, {\mathbb C} )$ , and
with q being a variable. Put
By [Reference Qin38, Theorem 10.1], the space $\mathcal F_X$ is an irreducible representation of the Heisenberg algebra generated by the operators $\mathfrak p_m(\alpha ) \in \mathrm {End}(\mathcal F_X), m \in \mathbb Z$ and $\alpha \in H^*(X, {\mathbb C} )$ with the commutation relation
and with the vacuum vector $|0\rangle = 1 \in H^*(pt, {\mathbb C} ) \cong {\mathbb C} $ . Define $\Psi _n$ by putting
Then, $\Psi _n: H_{CR}^*(X^{(n)}, {\mathbb C} ) \to H_{\rho _n}^*( X^{[n]}, {\mathbb C} )$ is an isomorphism of vector spaces. To show $\Psi _n$ is a ring isomorphism, we must prove that for all $w_1, w_2, w_3 \in H_{\rho _n}^*( X^{[n]}, {\mathbb C} )$ ,
In the rest of the proof, we assume $n =3$ . To prove (4.34), it suffices to prove it as $w_1, w_2, w_3$ run over the linear basis (4.6) of $H_{\rho _n}^*( X^{[3]}, {\mathbb C} )$ . We will only prove (4.34) for the case
with $\alpha _i \in H^2(X, {\mathbb C} )$ since the remaining cases are similar, long and tedious. By Theorem 4.10 (ii) and (3.16), $\langle w_1, w_2, w_3 \rangle _{\rho _n}(q)$ is equal to
So $\langle w_1, w_2, w_3 \rangle _{\rho _n}(-1) = \langle w_1, w_2, w_3 \rangle + 18 \langle K_X, \alpha _i \rangle $ . We claim that
Indeed, we see from the first five lines in the proof of Lemma 4.8 that
Note that $\langle c_1^2 \cdot w_1, w_3 \rangle = \langle c_1 w_1, c_1 w_3 \rangle $ . By (4.20), $\langle w_1, w_2, w_3 \rangle $ is equal to
Similar to (4.20), $c_1 w_3$ is equal to
Together with $\langle {\mathfrak a}_{-3}(K_X)|0\rangle , {\mathfrak a}_{-3}(\alpha _i)|0\rangle \rangle = 3 \langle K_X, \alpha _i \rangle $ , we see that
By a similar calculation, $\langle {\mathfrak a}_{-1}(1_X) {\mathfrak a}_{-2}(K_X)|0\rangle \cdot w_1, w_3 \rangle = 12 \langle K_X, \alpha _i \rangle $ . So we get $ \langle w_1, w_2, w_3 \rangle = -24 \langle K_X, \alpha _i \rangle + 6 \langle K_X, \alpha _i \rangle = -18 \langle K_X, \alpha _i \rangle. $ This proves (4.36). Thus,
On the orbifold side, the calculation of $\langle \Psi _3^{-1}(w_1), \Psi _3^{-1}(w_2), \Psi _3^{-1}(w_3) \rangle _{CR}$ is similar but much simpler. Indeed, by the results in [Reference Qin38],
can be read from its counterpart $\langle w_1, w_2, w_3 \rangle $ by replacing every term $\langle K_X, \alpha _i \rangle $ by $0$ . Hence, $ \langle \Psi _3^{-1}(w_1), \Psi _3^{-1}(w_2), \Psi _3^{-1}(w_3) \rangle _{CR} = 0 $ by (4.36). Together with (4.37), we conclude that (4.34) holds for the case (4.35).
5 Genus- $1$ extremal Gromov-Witten invariants of $ X^{[3]}$
In this section, we determine the genus- $1$ extremal Gromov-Witten invariants of the Hilbert scheme $ X^{[3]}$ . First of all, we show that Conjecture 1.3 holds for $n=3$ .
Lemma 5.1. Let X be a smooth projective surface, and let $d \ge 1$ . Then,
where $a_d$ and $b_d$ are universal constants depending only on d.
Proof. Let $[\varphi : D \to X^{[3]}] \in {\overline {\mathfrak M}}_{1, 0}( X^{[3]}, d\beta _3)$ . Then, $\varphi (D)$ is contracted by the Hilbert-Chow morphism $\rho _3: X^{[3]} \to X^{(3)}$ . So either $\rho _3(\varphi (D)) = x_1 + 2x_2$ for some points $x_1 \ne x_2$ , or $\rho _3(\varphi (D)) = 3x$ for some point $x \in X$ . When $\rho _3(\varphi (D)) = x_1 + 2x_2$ , every image $\varphi (p)$ is of the form $x_1 + \xi (p)$ for some $\xi (p) \in M_2(x_2)$ . Define
by $\varphi '(p) = \xi (p)$ . Then $\varphi '$ is a stable map, and gives rise to an element
The stable map $\varphi '$ is one of the two components in the standard decomposition of $\varphi $ (see (3.13)). The other component in the standard decomposition of $\varphi $ is the constant map $D \to x_1 \in X$ . Conversely, given a point $x_1 \in X$ and an element
with $\{x_1\} \ne \mathrm {Supp} \big (\rho _2(\varphi '(D)) \big )$ , we can define a unique stable map
by $\varphi (p) = x_1 + \varphi '(p)$ . Using the arguments in [Reference Li and Qin28], we conclude that
for some universal constants $a_d$ and $b_d$ depending only on d.
In the rest of this section, we will determine the universal constants $a_d$ and $b_d$ in Lemma 5.1. We will let X be a smooth projective toric surface and use torus actions and virtual localizations as in [Reference Edidin, Li and Qin8, Reference Graber and Pandharipande12, Reference Kontsevich and Manin20, Reference Liu and Sheshmani30] to compute $\langle \rangle _{1, d\beta _3}$ .
5.1 The contracted $( {\mathbb C} ^*)^2$ -invariant curves in $ X^{[3]}$ for a toric surface X
Let X be a smooth projective toric surface. In this subsection, we will write down all the invariant curves contracted by the Hilbert-Chow morphism $\rho _3: X^{[3]} \to X^{(3)}$ .
We begin with some standard setups. The surface X is determined by a fan $\Sigma $ which is a finite collection of strongly convex rational polyhedral cones $\sigma $ contained in $N = \mathrm {Hom}(M, \mathbb Z)$ , where $M \cong \mathbb Z^2$ . So X is obtained by gluing together affine toric varieties $X_{\sigma }$ and $X_{\tau }$ along $X_{\sigma \cap \tau }$ for $\sigma , \tau \in \Sigma $ . The coordinate ring of $X_{\sigma }$ is $ {\mathbb C} [\sigma ^{\vee } \cap M]$ , which is the $ {\mathbb C} $ -algebra with generators $\chi ^m$ for $m \in \sigma ^{\vee } \cap M$ and multiplication defined by $\chi ^m \cdot \chi ^{m'} = \chi ^{m+m'}$ . By definition, $\sigma ^{\vee } \cap M$ is the set of elements $m \in M$ satisfying $v(m) \ge 0$ for all $v \in \sigma $ . The torus
acts on X with finitely many fixed points $x_1, \ldots , x_{\chi (X)}$ . For each i, the point $x_i$ lies in $U_i := X_{\sigma _i}$ for some $\sigma _i \in \Sigma $ . As X is smooth and $U_i$ possesses a unique fixed point $x_i$ , $U_i$ is isomorphic to the affine plane with $x_i$ corresponding to the origin. Let $u_i, v_i$ be the affine coordinates of $U_i$ . Assume that
for $(s, t) \in {\mathbb T}$ , where $\lambda _i(s,t)$ and $\mu _i(s,t)$ are two independent characters of $ {\mathbb T}$ . Denote the weights of $\lambda _i(s,t)$ and $\mu _i(s,t)$ by $w_i$ and $z_i$ , respectively, that is,
in the equivariant Chow group $A^{ {\mathbb T}}_*(pt)$ . By the Atiyah-Bott localization formula,
noting that $T_{x_i, X} = \big ( \lambda _i(s,t) \big )^{-1} + \big ( \mu _i(s,t) \big )^{-1}$ as representations.
The $ {\mathbb T}$ -action on the toric surface X induces a $ {\mathbb T}$ -action on the Hilbert scheme $ X^{[3]}$ with a finite number of fixed points. The $ {\mathbb T}$ -fixed points in $ X^{[3]}$ are enumerated as follows. For each $1 \le i \le \chi (X)$ , there are three $ {\mathbb T}$ -fixed points
in $M_3(x_i) \subset X^{[3]}$ corresponding, respectively, to the partitions $(2,1)$ , $(3)$ and $(1,1,1)$ of $3$ . The corresponding ideals are $(v_i^2, v_iu_i, u_i^2)$ , $(v_i^3, u_i)$ and $(v_i, u_i^3)$ . Also for each ordered pair $(i, j)$ with $i, j \in \{1, \ldots , \chi (X)\}$ and $i \ne j$ , we have two fixed points
in $ X^{[3]}$ , where $\xi _{i, 1}, \xi _{i, 2} \in M_2(x_i)$ correspond to the ideals $(v_i^2, u_i), (v_i, u_i^2)$ , respectively. Furthermore, whenever $i, j, k \in \{1, \ldots , \chi (X)\}$ are mutually distinct, $x_i+x_j+x_k \in X^{[3]}$ is a $ {\mathbb T}$ -fixed point in $ X^{[3]}$ . Denote the tangent space of $ X^{[3]}$ at $\xi \in X^{[3]}$ by $T_{\xi }$ . As representations of $ {\mathbb T}$ , we have the decompositions (see [Reference Ellingsrud and Strømme9]):
There are exactly three $ {\mathbb T}$ -invariant curves $C_{0, 1}^{(i)}$ , $C_{0, 2}^{(i)}$ and $C_{1, 2}^{(i)}$ in $M_3(x_i)$ . Namely, $C_{0, 1}^{(i)}$ goes through $Q_{i, 0}$ and $Q_{i, 1}$ , and is the fixed locus of $\ker (\lambda _i \mu _i^{-2})$ ; $C_{0, 2}^{(i)}$ goes through $Q_{i, 0}$ and $Q_{i, 2}$ , and is the fixed locus of $\ker (\lambda _i^{-2}\mu _i)$ ; $C_{1, 2}^{(i)}$ goes through $Q_{i, 1}$ and $Q_{i, 2}$ , and is the fixed locus of $\ker (\lambda _i^{-1}\mu _i)$ . The following is from [Reference Edidin, Li and Qin8].
Lemma 5.2. There are exactly $\chi (X)(\chi (X)+2) \ {\mathbb T}$ -invariant curves contracted by the Hilbert-Chow morphism $\rho _3: X^{[3]} \to X^{(3)}$ . They are described as follows:
-
(i) the curves $C_{i, j} = M_2(x_i) + x_j$ where $1 \le i, j \le \chi (X)$ and $i \neq j$ ;
-
(ii) the curves $C_{k, \ell }^{(i)} \subset M_3(x_i)$ where $1 \le i \le \chi (X)$ and $0 \leq k < \ell \le 2$ .
Moreover, $C_{i, j} \sim C_{0,1}^{(i)} \sim C_{0,2}^{(i)} \sim \beta _3$ and $C_{1,2}^{(i)} \sim 3\beta _3$ for every $1 \le i \ne j \le \chi (X)$ .
Next, let $f: {\mathbb P}^1 \to X^{[3]}$ be a degree-d morphism such that the image is one of the $ {\mathbb T}$ -invariant curves in Lemma 5.2 and f is totally ramified at the two $ {\mathbb T}$ -fixed points in $f({\mathbb P}^1)$ . The Euler characteristic $\chi (f^*T_{ X^{[3]}})$ (as a representation) has been computed in [Reference Edidin, Li and Qin8]. When $f({\mathbb P}^1) = C_{0,1}^{(i)}$ , we have
where $\Theta _{0,1}^{(i)} = \sum _{m= 1}^{d-1} (\lambda _i\mu _i^{-2})^{m/d}$ ( $\Theta _{0,1}^{(i)} = 0$ when $d=1$ ). If $f({\mathbb P}^1) = C_{0,2}^{(i)}$ , then
where $\Theta _{0,2}^{(i)} = \sum _{m=1}^{d-1} (\mu _i\lambda _i^{-2})^{m/d}$ ( $\Theta _{0,2}^{(i)} = 0$ when $d = 1$ ). Let $\Theta _{1,2}^{(i)} = \sum _{m= 1}^{d-1} (\lambda _i\mu _i^{-1})^{m/d}$ with $\Theta _{1,2}^{(i)} = 0$ when $d=1$ . If $f({\mathbb P}^1) = C_{1,2}^{(i)}$ , then $\chi (f^*T_{ X^{[3]}})$ is equal to
Finally, when $f({\mathbb P}^1) = C_{i, j}$ , then $\chi (f^*T_{ X^{[3]}})$ is equal to
5.2 $ {\mathbb T}$ -invariant stable maps, stable graphs and localizations
Let X be a smooth projective toric surface and $d \ge 1$ . For simplicity, put
In this subsection, using virtual localization formula, we will express the genus- $1$ extremal Gromov-Witten invariant $\langle \rangle _{1, d\beta _3}$ in terms of stable graphs.
As in [Reference Graber and Pandharipande12, Reference Kontsevich19], if $[f: C \to X^{[3]}] \in {\overline {\mathfrak M}}_{1, 0, d}$ is $ {\mathbb T}$ -invariant, then all the nodes, contracted components and ramification points are mapped into the $ {\mathbb T}$ -fixed point set $( X^{[3]})^{{\mathbb T}}$ . Moreover, if $\widetilde C \subset C$ is a noncontracted component, then $\widetilde C = {\mathbb P}^1$ , $f(\widetilde C)$ is one of the $ {\mathbb T}$ -invariant curves in Lemma 5.2, and $f|_{\widetilde C}$ is of the form
where $\tilde d = \deg (f|_{\widetilde C})$ . Therefore, to each stable map $[f: C \to X^{[3]}] \in ( {\overline {\mathfrak M}}_{1, 0, d})^{{\mathbb T}}$ , we can associate a stable graph $\Gamma $ as follows. The stable graph $\Gamma $ has one vertex for each connected component of $f^{-1}(( X^{[3]})^{{\mathbb T}})$ and one edge for every noncontracted component. The edge e is marked with the degree $d_e$ of f restricted to that noncontracted component $C_e = {\mathbb P}^1$ , and the connected component corresponding to a vertex v is denoted by $C_v$ . Let $V(\Gamma )$ (respectively, $E(\Gamma )$ ) denote the set of vertices (respectively, edges) of $\Gamma $ . Define the labeling map
by putting $\mathfrak L(v) = f(C_v)$ . The vertices have an additional labeling $g(v)$ which is the arithmetic genus of $C_v$ ( $g(v) = 0$ if $C_v$ is a point) and satisfies the identity
The valence of v, denoted by $\mathrm {val}(v)$ , is the number of edges connected to v. Define a flag F of the graph $\Gamma $ to be an incident edge-vertex pair $(e, v)$ . Put
A flag $F = (e, v)$ is defined to be stable if $2g(v) + \mathrm {val}(v) \ge 3$ . Since $\mathrm {val}(v) \ge 1$ , F is not stable if $g(v) = 0$ and $\mathrm {val}(v) = 1$ or $2$ (in these cases, the component $C_v$ is simply a point). Let $F(\Gamma )$ (respectively, $F(\Gamma )^{\mathrm {sta}}$ ) be the set of flags (respectively, stable flags) in $\Gamma $ . The edge e in $F = (e, v)$ is incident to one other vertex $v'$ . Define $j(F) = \mathfrak L(v')$ . If $\mathrm {val}(v) = 1$ , let $F(v)$ be the unique flag containing v; if $\mathrm {val}(v) = 2$ , let $F_1(v)$ and $F_2(v)$ denote the two flags containing v.
Now the connected components of $( {\overline {\mathfrak M}}_{1, 0, d})^{{\mathbb T}}$ are indexed by stable graphs corresponding to stable maps whose images are unions of the $ {\mathbb T}$ -invariant curves in Lemma 5.2 and whose contracted components and special points are mapped into $( X^{[3]})^{{\mathbb T}}$ . We use $\Gamma $ to denote these stable graphs. So we have
where ${ {\overline {\mathfrak M}}}_{\Gamma }$ denotes the connected component of $( {\overline {\mathfrak M}}_{1, 0, d})^{{\mathbb T}}$ indexed by $\Gamma $ . Let $\overline {M}_{g, n}$ be the moduli space of n-pointed genus-g stable curves. Put
( $\overline {M}_{0, 1}$ and $\overline {M}_{0, 2}$ are treated as points in this product). Then there is a finite map $\overline {M}_{\Gamma } \to {\overline {\mathfrak M}}_{\Gamma }$ such that $ {\overline {\mathfrak M}}_{\Gamma } = \overline {M}_{\Gamma }/\mathbf {A}_{\Gamma }$ where $\mathbf {A}_{\Gamma }$ fits in the exact sequence
Since a stable curve is connected, we see from the description of the $ {\mathbb T}$ -invariant curves in Lemma 5.2 that a summation over all the stable graphs $\Gamma $ breaks up as
where ${{\mathcal S}}_{d,i,j}$ is the set of all stable graphs $\Gamma $ such that $f(C) = C_{i,j}$ for every $[f: C \to X^{[3]}] \in {\overline {\mathfrak M}}_{\Gamma }$ , and ${\mathcal T}_{d,i}$ is the set of all stable graphs $\Gamma $ such that $f(C) \subset C_{0,1}^{(i)} \cup C_{0,2}^{(i)} \cup C_{1,2}^{(i)}$ for every $[f: C \to X^{[3]}] \in {\overline {\mathfrak M}}_{\Gamma }$ .
By the virtual localization formula of [Reference Graber and Pandharipande12], we have
Here, $[\overline {M}_{\Gamma }]^{\mathrm {vir}} $ is the pullback of $[ {\overline {\mathfrak M}}_{\Gamma }]^{\mathrm {vir}} $ to $M_{\Gamma }$ via the finite map $\overline {M}_{\Gamma } \to {\overline {\mathfrak M}}_{\Gamma }$ , and $e(N_{\Gamma }^{\mathrm {vir}} )$ is the pullback of the Euler class of the moving part $N_{\Gamma }^{\mathrm {vir}} $ of the tangent-obstruction complex. Let ${{\mathcal T}}^1$ and ${{\mathcal T}}^2$ be the cohomology sheaves of the restriction of the tangent-obstruction complex on $ {\overline {\mathfrak M}}_{1, 0, d}$ to $ {\overline {\mathfrak M}}_{\Gamma }$ . The fibers of ${{\mathcal T}}^1$ and ${{\mathcal T}}^2$ at a point associated to a stable map $[f: C \to X^{[3]}] \in {\overline {\mathfrak M}}_{\Gamma }$ fit into the exact sequence
To understand $H^i(C, f^*T_{ X^{[3]}})$ , consider the normalization sequence resolving the nodes of C coming from all the intersections $x_F := C_v \cap C_e$ :
Tensoring by $f^*T_{ X^{[3]}}$ and taking cohomology, we obtain an exact sequence
Note that $H^1(C_v, f^*T_{ X^{[3]}}) = H^1(C_v, \mathcal O_{C_v}) \otimes T_{\mathfrak L(v)}$ where $H^1(C_v, \mathcal O_{C_v})$ forms the dual of the Hodge bundle $\mathcal H_{g(v)}$ over $\overline {M}_{g(v), \mathrm {val}(v)}$ . By the five formulas (5.2)-(5.6), the fixed parts of $T_{i(F)}$ and $H^1(C_v, f^*T_{ X^{[3]}})$ vanish. Examining the terms in the four formulas (5.7)-(5.10) which carry negative signs, we see that the fixed part of $H^1(C_e, f^*T_{ X^{[3]}})$ also vanishes. By (5.15), the fixed part of $H^1(C, f^*T_{ X^{[3]}})$ vanishes. Thus, ${{\mathcal T}}^{2, f} = 0$ , and the fixed stack is smooth with tangent bundle ${{\mathcal T}}^{1, f}$ . Hence, $[ {\overline {\mathfrak M}}_{\Gamma }]^{\mathrm {vir}} = [ {\overline {\mathfrak M}}_{\Gamma }]$ and $[\overline {M}_{\Gamma }]^{\mathrm {vir}} = [\overline {M}_{\Gamma }]$ . By (5.14), we obtain
In view of the splitting (5.13), the invariant $\langle \rangle _{1, d\beta _3}$ can be written as
5.3 Reformulation of $ \sum _{1 \leq i \neq j \leq \chi (X)} \,\, \sum _{\Gamma \in {{ \mathcal S}}_{d,i,j}}$
In this subsection, we will reformulate the summation $\sum _{1 \leq i\neq j \leq \chi (X)} \,\, \sum _{\Gamma \in {{\mathcal S}}_{d,i,j}}$ in (5.16) by a suitable genus- $1$ Gromov-Witten invariant of $X \times {X^{[2]}}$ . It allows us to reduce the computation of $\langle \rangle _{1, d\beta _3}$ to the local affine charts $U_i \ni x_i$ .
For $1 \le i \le \chi (X)$ and $1 \le k \le 2$ , let $R_{i,i}^{(k)} = (x_i, \xi _{i, k}) \in X \times {X^{[2]}}$ and
For $1 \le i \ne j \le \chi (X)$ , regard the curve $C_{i, j} \subset X^{[3]}$ in Lemma 5.2 (i) as the curve $\{ x_j \} \times M_2(x_i) \subset X \times {X^{[2]}}$ . The $ {\mathbb T}$ -action on X induces a $ {\mathbb T}$ -action on $X \times {X^{[2]}}$ . The $ {\mathbb T}$ -fixed point set $(X \times {X^{[2]}})^{{\mathbb T}}$ consists of the points $R_{i,j}^{(k)}$ with $1 \le i, j \le \chi (X)$ and $1 \le k \le 2$ . The $ {\mathbb T}$ -invariant curves in $X \times {X^{[2]}}$ contracted by
are precisely the curves $C_{i, j}$ with $1 \le i, j \le \chi (X)$ . The decompositions of the tangent spaces of $X \times {X^{[2]}}$ at the points $R_{i,j}^{(k)}$ are given by the right-hand sides of (5.5) and (5.6). So we keep using $T_{R_{i,j}^{(k)}}$ to denote the tangent space of $X \times {X^{[2]}}$ at $R_{i,j}^{(k)}$ . Similarly, if $f: {\mathbb P}^1 \to X \times {X^{[2]}}$ is a degree-d morphism such that $f({\mathbb P}^1) = C_{i,j}$ and f is totally ramified at the two $ {\mathbb T}$ -fixed points in $f({\mathbb P}^1)$ , then the Euler characteristic $\chi (f^*T_{X \times {X^{[2]}}})$ is given by the right-hand side of (5.10).
Regard $\beta _2 \in H_2( {X^{[2]}})$ as in $H_2(X \times {X^{[2]}})$ . Apply localization to the moduli space
whose expected dimension is equal to $0$ . The connected components of the $ {\mathbb T}$ -fixed point set $\big ( {\overline {\mathfrak M}}_{1, 0}(X \times {X^{[2]}}, d\beta _2) \big )^{{\mathbb T}}$ are indexed by stable graphs $\Gamma $ . For $1 \le i, j \le \chi (X)$ , let ${{\mathcal S}}_{d,i,j}$ be the set of all stable graphs $\Gamma $ such that $f(C) = C_{i,j}$ for every stable map $[f: C \to X \times {X^{[2]}}]$ in the connected component $ {\overline {\mathfrak M}}_{\Gamma }$ indexed by $\Gamma $ . Note that when $i \ne j$ , ${{\mathcal S}}_{d,i,j}$ can be identified with the set ${{\mathcal S}}_{d,i,j}$ introduced in (5.13). Moreover, for $\Gamma \in {{\mathcal S}}_{d,i,j}$ with $i \ne j$ , $ {\overline {\mathfrak M}}_{\Gamma }$ can be identified with the connected component $ {\overline {\mathfrak M}}_{\Gamma }$ introduced in (5.11). By the virtual localization formula,
Note that for each graph $\Gamma \in {{\mathcal S}}_{d,i,j}$ with $i \ne j$ , the summand $\displaystyle {\frac {1}{|\mathbf {A}_{\Gamma }|} \int _{[\overline {M}_{\Gamma }]} \frac {1}{e(N_{\Gamma }^{\mathrm {vir}} )}}$ in (5.17) is equal to the corresponding summand in (5.16).
Lemma 5.3. $\displaystyle {\int _{[ {\overline {\mathfrak M}}_{1, 0}(X \times {X^{[2]}}, d\beta _2)]^{\mathrm {vir}} } 1 \,\, = \,\, \frac {1}{12d} \cdot \chi (X) \cdot K_X^2}$ .
Proof. We have $ {\overline {\mathfrak M}}_{1, 0}(X \times {X^{[2]}}, d\beta _2) \cong X \times {\overline {\mathfrak M}}_{1, 0}( {X^{[2]}}, d\beta _2)$ . By the results in [Reference Hu, Li and Qin15], the moduli space $ {\overline {\mathfrak M}}_{1, 0}( {X^{[2]}}, d\beta _2)$ is smooth (as a stack) with dimension $(2d+2)$ , and the obstruction sheaf $\mathcal Ob = R^1(f_{1,0})_*\mathrm {ev}_1^*T_{ {X^{[2]}}}$ on $ {\overline {\mathfrak M}}_{1, 0}( {X^{[2]}}, d\beta _2)$ is locally free of rank $(2d+2)$ where $f_{1,0}$ (respectively, $\mathrm {ev}_1$ ) denotes the forgetful (respectively, evaluation) map on $ {\overline {\mathfrak M}}_{1, 1}( {X^{[2]}}, d\beta _2)$ . Moreover, we have
Let $\phi _1$ and $\phi _2$ be the two projections on $X \times {\overline {\mathfrak M}}_{1, 0}( {X^{[2]}}, d\beta _2)$ . Let $\mathcal H_1$ be the (rank- $1$ ) Hodge bundle over the moduli space $ {\overline {\mathfrak M}}_{1, 0}( {X^{[2]}}, d\beta _2)$ . A direct computation shows that the obstruction sheaf over $ {\overline {\mathfrak M}}_{1, 0}(X \times {X^{[2]}}, d\beta _2)$ is isomorphic to
which is locally free of rank $(2d+4)$ . Therefore, we conclude that
Combining this with (5.18), we immediately verify our lemma.
From (5.16), (5.17) and Lemma 5.3, we conclude that
Note that $\sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d,i}} - \sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal S}_{d,i, i}}$ depends only on the local chart $U_i \ni x_i$ .
For simplicity, whenever S is a set of stable graphs, we use $\sum _{\Gamma \in S}$ to denote
5.4 A reduction lemma
In this subsection, we will prove a reduction lemma which indicates that we may ignore most of the stable graphs in ${\mathcal T}_{d,i}$ and ${\mathcal S}_{d,i, i}$ when we evaluate the summation $\sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d,i}} - \sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal S}_{d,i, i}}$ in (5.19).
Before we state the reduction lemma, we present the motivations. As we will see in the next two subsections, $\sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d,i}} - \sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal S}_{d,i, i}}$ is of the form
where $p_{1,1}(w_i, z_i), q_{1,1}(w_i, z_i), p_{1,2}(w_i, z_i), q_{1,2}(w_i, z_i) \in {\mathbb Q}[w_i, z_i]$ are symmetric homogeneous polynomials independent of i and X, $(w_i + z_i) \nmid q_{1,1}(w_i, z_i)$ , $(w_i + z_i) \nmid q_{1,2}(w_i, z_i)$ , $\deg (q_{1,1}) = \deg (p_{1,1}) + 2$ , $\deg (q_{1,2}) = \deg (p_{1,2}) + 3$ and all the roots of $q_{1,1}(w, 1)$ and $q_{1,2}(w, 1)$ are rational. Note that $p_{1,1}(w_i, z_i), q_{1,1}(w_i, z_i), p_{1,2}(w_i, z_i)$ and $q_{1,2}(w_i, z_i)$ can be expressed as polynomials in $w_i + z_i$ and $w_iz_i$ . So the summation $\sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d,i}} - \sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal S}_{d,i, i}}$ can be rewritten as
where $\tilde a$ and m are independent of i and X, and $p_{2,2}(w_i, z_i)$ is a symmetric homogeneous polynomial independent of i and X. Put $q_{1,1}(w_i, z_i) = \tilde a_0 (w_iz_i)^{m+1} + \tilde a_1 (w_iz_i)^{m}(w_i + z_i)^2 + \ldots + \tilde a_{m+1}(w_i + z_i)^{2(m+1)}$ . Then,
where $a = \tilde a/\tilde a_0$ , and $p_{2,1}(w_i, z_i)$ is a symmetric homogeneous polynomial independent of i and X. It follows that $\sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d,i}} - \sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal S}_{d,i, i}}$ is of the form
where $a_d (= a), p_d(w_i, z_i)$ and $q_d(w_i, z_i)$ are independent of i and X and depend only on d, $a_d \in {\mathbb Q}$ , $p_d(w_i, z_i)$ and $q_d(w_i, z_i)$ are symmetric homogeneous polynomials in ${\mathbb Q}[w_i, z_i]$ , $(w_i + z_i) \nmid q_d(w_i, z_i)$ and the roots of $q_d(w, 1)$ are rational. Our reduction lemma below asserts that $p_d = 0$ .
Lemma 5.4. The summation $\sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d,i}} - \sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal S}_{d,i, i}}$ is of the form
where $a_d \in {\mathbb Q}$ is independent of i and X and depends only on d, and
Proof. Note that (5.23) follows from (5.19), (5.22) and (5.1). In the following, we will prove (5.22) (i.e., we will show that $p_d = 0$ in (5.21)). For convenience, we will simply write $a, p, q$ instead of $a_d, p_d, q_d$ . Assume $p \ne 0$ . We will draw contradictions. We may further assume that $p(w_i, z_i)$ and $q(w_i, z_i)$ have no common factors of positive degrees and that $q(w, 1)$ is monic.
First of all, we conclude from (5.19), (5.21) and (5.1) that
For simplicity, denote the right-hand side of (5.24) by $e(X, d)$ . The symmetric polynomials $p(w_i, z_i)$ and $q(w_i, z_i)$ can be expressed as polynomials in $(w_i + z_i)$ and $w_iz_i$ . Since $(w_i + z_i) \nmid q(w_i, z_i)$ , $q(w_i, z_i)$ is of the form
where $n_0 \ge 0$ , $k \ge 0$ , $a_1, \ldots , a_k$ are distinct and $a_j \ne 0$ and $n_j> 0$ for every j. So $\deg (q)$ is even, $\deg (p) = \deg (q) - 3$ is odd and $(w_i + z_i)|p(w_i, z_i)$ . Put
Being of even degree, the symmetric homogeneous polynomial $\tilde p(w_i, z_i)$ is a polynomial of $(w_i + z_i)^2$ and $w_i z_i$ . By (5.24), we have
For $X = {\mathbb P}^2$ and ${\mathbb P}^1 \times {\mathbb P}^1$ , the weights $w_i$ and $z_i$ are of the form
Set $z=1$ . Letting $X = {\mathbb P}^2$ and $X = {\mathbb P}^1 \times {\mathbb P}^1$ in (5.26), respectively, we obtain
where $e_1=e({\mathbb P}^2, d)$ and $e_2 = e({\mathbb P}^1 \times {\mathbb P}^1, d)/2$ . Since $p(w_i, z_i)$ and $q(w_i, z_i)$ have no common factor of positive degree, neither do $\tilde p(w, 1)$ and $\tilde q(w, 1)$ . If $k \ge 1$ , then by (5.28) and (5.25), $\tilde q(w, 1)|\tilde q(-w, 1)$ . So $\tilde q(w, 1) = \tilde q(-w, 1)$ since they are monic and $\tilde q(w_i, z_i) = \tilde q(-w_i, z_i)$ . Since the roots of $q(w, 1)$ are rational, $a_j \ne -2$ and
for j and i. Therefore, $(w_i + z_i)^2 + a_j w_i z_i$ and $(w_i - z_i)^2 - a_j w_i z_i$ are distinct factors in the decomposition (5.25) of $q(w_i, z_i)$ , and $q(w_i, z_i) $ can be rewritten as
where $s = k/2 \ge 0$ , $\tilde a_j = (2+a_j)^2$ and $\tilde a_1, \ldots , \tilde a_s$ are distinct. Since the roots of $(w +1)^2 + a_j w$ are rational, $\tilde a_j \ge 4$ . Since $(w_i + z_i) \nmid q(w_i, z_i)$ , $\tilde a_j \ne 4$ . So $\tilde a_j> 4$ , and $a_j \ne 0, -4$ . Let $n = \deg (q) = 2n_0 + 4(n_1 + \ldots + n_s).$ Then $\deg (\tilde p) = n-4$ .
If $n_0$ is positive and even, then as a polynomial in $(w_i + z_i)^2$ and $w_i z_i$ , $\tilde p(w_i, z_i)$ contains the monomial $(w_i + z_i)^{n - 4}$ with nonzero coefficient. So $(w + 1)^4 \, \tilde p(w, 1)$ is a polynomial of degree n in w. Since $q(w, 1)$ is of degree $n - n_0$ , letting $w \to \infty $ in (5.28), we get $\infty = e_2$ . This is impossible since $e_2$ is a finite number.
If $n_0$ is odd with $n_0 \ge 3$ , then write $\tilde p(w_i, z_i) = \sum _{j=0}^{n-4} h_j w_i^j z_i^{(n-4)-j}$ . Since $\tilde p(w_i, z_i)$ is symmetric, $h_j = h_{(n-4)-j}$ . Since $(w_iz_i) \nmid \tilde p(w_i, z_i)$ , $h_0 \ne 0$ . Since $a_j \not \in \{0, -4\}$ , we see that $w \nmid q(w-1, -1)$ and $w \nmid \tilde q(1-w, -w)$ . Substitute (5.30) into (5.27) and (5.28). Expanding the left-hand sides of (5.27) and (5.28), we get
where $O(w^{-i})$ with $i> 0$ denotes a term such that as $w \to 0$ , $|O(w^{-i})| \le c |w^{-i}|$ for some constant c. The two coefficients of $w^{-(n_0-1)}$ cannot be $0$ simultaneously. So letting $w \to 0$ , we have either $\infty = e_1$ or $\infty = e_2$ . This is absurd.
By the previous two paragraphs, $n_0 = 0$ or $1$ . Since $\deg (q) \ge 3$ , $s \ge 1$ . The roots of $(w^2 + 1)^2 - \tilde a_j w^2$ are $\alpha , \alpha ^{-1}, -\alpha , -\alpha ^{-1}$ for some rational number $\alpha \ne 0, 1$ , and these four roots are mutually distinct. Let $\alpha _0, \alpha _0^{-1}, -\alpha _0, -\alpha _0^{-1}$ be the roots of $(w^2 + 1)^2 - \tilde a_1 w^2$ . By symmetry, let $0 < \alpha _0 < 1$ . If $(w + \alpha _0) \nmid \big (q(w-1,-1)q(1-w, -w) \big )$ , then letting $w \to -\alpha _0$ in (5.27), we obtain the contradiction $\infty = e_1$ . If $(w + \alpha _0)|q(w-1,-1)$ , then $(\alpha _0 + 1) \ne 0$ is a root of $q(w, 1)$ . Therefore, $1/(\alpha _0 + 1)$ is a root of $q(w, 1)$ as well. Similarly, if $(w + \alpha _0)|q(1-w, -w)$ , then $-(\alpha _0 + 1)/\alpha _0$ is a root of $q(w, 1)$ ; in this case, $\alpha _0/(\alpha _0 + 1)$ is also a root of $q(w, 1)$ . Note that $0 < 1/(\alpha _0 + 1), \alpha _0/(\alpha _0 + 1) < 1$ . Define two functions
So there exists $\psi _1 \in \{\phi _1, \phi _2\}$ such that $\psi _1(\alpha _0)$ is a root of $q(w, 1)$ . Putting $\alpha _1 = \psi _1(\alpha _0)$ and repeating the above process, we see that $q(w, 1)$ has a sequence of roots
where $\psi _1, \ldots , \psi _k \in \{\phi _1, \phi _2\}$ . By induction, we get $0 < \alpha _k < 1$ for every $k \ge 0$ .
Claim. $\alpha _i \ne \alpha _k$ whenever $i, k \ge 0$ and $i \ne k$ .
Proof. Assume $\alpha _i = \alpha _k$ with $0 \le i < k$ . Then, $\alpha _k = \psi _k \cdots \psi _{i+1}(\alpha _i)$ . So we may assume that $i = 0$ , $\alpha _0 = \alpha _k$ and $\alpha _k = \psi _k \cdots \psi _1(\alpha _0)$ . Since $\psi _1, \ldots , \psi _k \in \{\phi _1, \phi _2\}$ , we see from induction that $\alpha _k = (a \alpha _0 + b)/(c \alpha _0 + d)$ for some integers $a \ge 0, b \ge 0, c \ge 1, d \ge 1$ satisfying $ad - bc = \pm 1$ . So $\alpha _0 = (a \alpha _0 + b)/(c \alpha _0 + d)$ , and we get
Since $\alpha _0$ is a rational number, $(d-a)^2 + 4bc = f^2$ for some integer f. If $ad - bc = -1$ , then $f^2 = (d+a)^2 + 4$ , and so $d + a = 0$ , which contradicts $a \ge 0$ and $d \ge 1$ . If $ad - bc = 1$ , then $f^2 + 4 = (d+a)^2$ , and so $f=0$ and $d + a = 2$ . Since $a \ge 0, b \ge 0, c \ge 1, d \ge 1$ are integers satisfying $ad - bc = 1$ , we must have $a = d = 1$ , $b = 0$ and $\alpha _0 = 0$ . This contradicts $\alpha _0 \ne 0$ .
We continue the proof of our lemma. By the above claim, the polynomial $q(w, 1)$ has infinitely many roots $\alpha _k, k \ge 0$ which are mutually distinct. This is absurd.
In view of Lemma 5.4, we introduce the following notation.
Notation 5.5. We use $M((w+z)^n)$ to denote an expression of the form
where $p(w,z)$ and $q(w,z)$ are polynomials in w and z with $(w+z) \nmid q(w,z)$ , and all the roots of the polynomial $q(w, 1)$ are rational numbers.
By Lemma 5.4, when we evaluate the summation $\sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d,i}} - \sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal S}_{d,i, i}}$ in (5.19), we can ignore those stable graphs $\Gamma $ in ${\mathcal T}_{d,i}$ and ${\mathcal S}_{d,i, i}$ satisfying
5.5 Computation of $ \sum _{ \Gamma \in {\mathcal S}_{d,i, i}}$
For simplicity, in the rest of the paper, we put
Also, define $P_1(a, b) = 1$ . For $n \ge 2$ , we define
Now let $\Gamma \in {{\mathcal S}}_{d,i,i}$ . Similar to the formulas (4.18) to (4.21) in [Reference Edidin, Li and Qin8] (see also [Reference Liu and Sheshmani30]), we have the decomposition
Here, $e_{\Gamma }^{\mathrm {E}}, e_{\Gamma }^{\mathrm {V}}, e_{\Gamma }^{\mathrm {F}}$ denote the contributions of the edges, vertices and flags with
where (5.33) (which is the product of the equivariant Euler classes of the moving parts $\chi (((f|_{C_e})^*T_{X^{[3]}})^{\mathrm {mov}})$ , $e \in E(\Gamma )$ ) follows from (5.10) by reading its nonconstant terms, $\omega _F = e(T_{i(F)}C_{i,i})/d_e$ for a flag $F = (v, e)$ and $\psi _F$ denotes the first Chern class of the line bundle on $\overline M_{\Gamma }$ whose fiber is the cotangent space of the component associated to v at the point corresponding to F. Note from (5.5) and (5.6) that $T_{R_{i,i}^{(1)}}C_{i,i} = \lambda _i^{-1} \mu _i$ and $T_{R_{i,i}^{(2)}}C_{i,i} = \lambda _i \mu _i^{-1}$ . Thus, we obtain
In (5.34), when $g(v) = 0$ , $e(\mathcal H_{g(v)}^{\vee } \otimes T_{{\mathfrak L}(v)})$ is treated as $1$ ; when $g(v) = 1$ , $\mathcal H_{g(v)}$ is the rank- $1$ Hodge bundle over $\overline {M}_{g(v), \mathrm {val}(v)}$ . Let $\lambda = c_1(\mathcal H_1)$ . It is known that
For $1 \le j \le n$ , let $\psi _j$ be the first Chern class of the line bundle on $\overline M_{1, n}$ whose fiber at an n-pointed stable curve is the cotangent space of the curve at the j-th marked point. Then it is known (e.g., see [Reference Kock18]) that $\psi _1 = \lambda $ on $\overline M_{1, 1}$ and
Lemma 5.6. Let $d \ge 1$ , and let $\Gamma \in {{\mathcal S}}_{d,i,i}$ . Then, we have
Proof. We see from (5.33) that $(w+z)^{|E(\Gamma )|}$ divides the denominator of $e_{\Gamma }^{\mathrm {E}}$ . Moreover, $(w+z)$ does not divide the numerators in (5.33). So we have
where $p_{\Gamma , 1}(w,z)$ and $q_{\Gamma , 1}(w,z)$ are polynomials in w and z with $(w+z) \nmid q_{\Gamma , 1}(w,z)$ , and all the roots of $q_{\Gamma , 1}(w, 1)$ are rational. By (5.34), (5.35), (5.36), (5.5) and (5.6),
where $p_{\Gamma , 2}(w,z)$ and $q_{\Gamma , 2}(w,z)$ are polynomials in w and z with $(w+z) \nmid q_{\Gamma , 2}(w,z)$ , and all the roots of $q_{\Gamma , 2}(w, 1)$ are rational. By (5.32) and (5.40), we get (5.39).
Lemma 5.7. Let $d \ge 1$ . Then, the summation $\sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal S}_{d,i, i}}$ is equal to
where $\delta = (d_1, d_2) \vdash d$ denotes a length- $2$ partition of d, $|\mathrm {Aut}(\delta )| = 1$ if $d_1 \ne d_2$ and $|\mathrm {Aut}(\delta )| = 2$ if $d_1 = d_2$ .
Proof. By Lemma 5.6, we need only to consider those stable graphs $\Gamma \in {\mathcal S}_{d,i, i}$ with $|E(\Gamma )| = 1$ or $2$ . We begin with the case $|E(\Gamma )| = 1$ (i.e., $\Gamma \in {\mathcal S}_{d,i, i}$ has exactly one edge). There are exactly two such stable graphs:
where $V(\Gamma ) = \{v_1, v_2\}$ , $\mathfrak L(v_1) = R_{i, i}^{(1)}$ , $\mathfrak L(v_2) = R_{i, i}^{(2)}$ , $g(v_1) \in \{1, 0\}$ and $g(v_2) \in \{1, 0\} - \{g(v_1)\}$ . In both cases, $|\mathbf {A}_{\Gamma }| = d \cdot |{\mathrm {Aut}} (\Gamma )| = d$ by (5.12). Using (5.32)-(5.37) and noticing that (5.33) is unchanged when w and z are switched, we get
Next, we consider the stable graphs $\Gamma \in {\mathcal S}_{d,i, i}$ with $|E(\Gamma )| = 2$ . So $\Gamma \in {\mathcal S}_{d,i, i}$ has exactly two edges. Denoting the distributions of the degree d on the two edges by $d_1$ and $d_2$ , we see that these stable graphs are of the form:
-
(i)
-
(ii)
A lengthy computation via (5.32)-(5.38) shows that $\sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal S}_{d,i, i}, \, |E(\Gamma )| = 2}$ is equal to
Summing this with (5.41), we complete the proof of our lemma.
5.6 Computation of $ \sum _{ \Gamma \in { \mathcal T}_{d, i}}$
Let $\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d,i}$ . For an edge $e \in E(\Gamma )$ and for $0\le j < k \le 2$ , define $e \in E_{j, k}(\Gamma )$ if the component $C_e$ is mapped to $C_{j, k}^{(i)}$ . By Lemma 5.2, the curves $C_{0,1}^{(i)}$ , $C_{0,2}^{(i)}$ and $C_{1,2}^{(i)}$ are homologous to $\beta _3$ , $\beta _3$ and $3\beta _3$ , respectively. Therefore,
Now formulas (5.32), (5.34) and (5.35) still hold with the understanding that
since $T_{Q_{i,0}}C_{0,1}^{(i)} = \lambda _i \mu _i^{-2}$ , $T_{Q_{i,1}}C_{0,1}^{(i)} = \lambda _i^{-1} \mu _i^{2}$ , $T_{Q_{i,0}}C_{0,2}^{(i)} = \lambda _i^{-2} \mu _i$ , $T_{Q_{i,2}}C_{0,2}^{(i)} = \lambda _i^{2} \mu _i^{-1}$ , $T_{Q_{i,1}}C_{1,2}^{(i)} = \lambda _i^{-1} \mu _i$ and $T_{Q_{i,2}}C_{1,2}^{(i)} = \lambda _i \mu _i^{-1}$ in view of (5.2), (5.3) and (5.4). Moreover, we see from (5.7), (5.8) and (5.9) that the factor $e_{\Gamma }^{\mathrm {E}}$ in (5.32) is given by
Notation 5.8. Let $d \ge 1$ , and let $\Gamma \in {{\mathcal T}}_{d,i}$ . We use $V_0(\Gamma )$ to denote the subset of $V(\Gamma )$ consisting of all the vertices v of $\Gamma $ such that
for the two edges $e_1(v)$ and $e_2(v)$ attaching to v, and $e_j(v) \in E_{0,j}(\Gamma )$ for $j = 1, 2$ .
If $v_1, v_2 \in V_0(\Gamma )$ are distinct, then $\mathfrak L(v_1) = Q_{i,0} = \mathfrak L(v_2)$ . So none of the two edges attaching to $v_1$ coincide with any of the two edges attaching to $v_2$ , and
Lemma 5.9. Let $d \ge 1$ and $\Gamma \in {{\mathcal T}}_{d,i}$ . Then,
unless one of the following cases happens:
-
(i) $|V_0(\Gamma )| = 2$ and $|E(\Gamma )| = 4$ ;
-
(ii) $|V_0(\Gamma )| = 1$ and $|E(\Gamma )| = 2$ ;
-
(iii) $|V_0(\Gamma )| = 1$ and $|E(\Gamma )| = 3$ ;
-
(iv) $|V_0(\Gamma )| = 0$ and $|E(\Gamma )| = 1$ ;
-
(v) $|V_0(\Gamma )| = 0$ and $|E(\Gamma )| = 2$ .
Proof. First of all, let us examine the factor $e_{\Gamma }^{\mathrm {E}}$ . If $e \in E_{0,1}(\Gamma )$ , then we see from (5.31) that $(w+z)| P_{d_e}(-d_e(w - z), w - 2z)$ if and only if $3|d_e$ ; moreover, if $3|d_e$ , then $(w+z)^2 \nmid P_{d_e}(-d_e(w - z), w - 2z)$ and $(w+z)|P_{d_e}(-d_e w, w - 2z)$ . Applying a similar argument to $e \in E_{0,2}(\Gamma )$ and $e \in E_{1, 2}(\Gamma )$ , we conclude that
Next, by (5.34), (5.35), (5.2), (5.3) and (5.4), the only possible factors in $1/(e_{\Gamma }^{\mathrm {V}} \cdot e_{\Gamma }^{\mathrm {F}})$ divisible by $(w+z)$ come from $(\omega _{F_1(v)}+ \omega _{F_2(v)})$ with $g(v) = 0$ and $ \mathrm {val} (v) = 2$ . If such a factor $(\omega _{F_1(v)}+ \omega _{F_2(v)})$ is divisible by $(w+z)$ , then we see from (5.43) that $\mathfrak L(v) = Q_{i,0}$ , $d_{e_1(v)} = d_{e_2(v)}$ for the two edges $e_1(v)$ and $e_2(v)$ attaching to v,
and $e_j(v) \in E_{0,j}(\Gamma )$ for $j = 1, 2$ . Hence, $v \in V_0(\Gamma )$ . It follows that
Combining this with (5.32) and (5.46), we conclude that
By (5.45), we have $|E(\Gamma )| - |V_0(\Gamma )| \ge |V_0(\Gamma )|$ . Now our lemma follows.
Lemma 5.10. Let $d \ge 1$ . Then, the summation $\sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d, i}}$ is equal to
where $f_d$ is a universal constant depending only on d and is given by
In the above, $d_1>0$ , $d_2>0$ , $\delta = (d_1, d_2)$ is a length- $2$ partition, $\gamma _{d_1} = -2$ if $3|d_1$ and $\gamma _{d_1} = 1$ if $3 \nmid d_1$ , ${\widetilde \gamma }_{d_2} = 3$ if $2|d_2$ and ${\widetilde \gamma }_{d_2} = 1$ if $2 \nmid d_2$ , and a summand containing $\sum _{\delta \vdash d/2}$ or $\gamma _{d/2}$ (respectively, $\sum _{\delta \vdash d/3}$ ) does not appear if $2 \nmid d$ (respectively, if $3 \nmid d$ ).
Proof. By Lemma 5.9, the computation of $\sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d, i}}$ is reduced to those stable graphs $\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d, i}$ satisfying Lemma 5.9 (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) or (v).
To begin, the stable graphs $\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d, i}$ satisfying Lemma 5.9 (i) are:
-
(i-1)
$$ \begin{align*}\sum_{\substack{\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d, i}, \, \text{Case (i-1)}}} = \frac{4}{9d^2} \sum_{\delta \vdash d/2} \frac{d_1d_2}{|\mathrm{Aut}(\delta)|} \cdot \gamma_{d_1}^2 \gamma_{d_2}^2 \cdot \frac{(w+z)^2}{wz} + M \big ((w+z)^3 \big ) \end{align*} $$where $\gamma _{d_1} = -2$ if $3|d_1$ and $\gamma _{d_1} = 1$ if $3 \nmid d_1$ .
-
(i-2)
$$ \begin{align*}\sum_{\substack{\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d, i}, \, \text{Case (i-2)}}} = \frac{1}{54d} \sum_{\delta \vdash d/2} \frac{d_1^2}{d_2} \cdot \gamma_{d_1}^2 \gamma_{d_2}^2 \cdot \frac{(w+z)^2}{wz} + M \big ((w+z)^3 \big ). \end{align*} $$ -
(i-3) $\Gamma $ has the same shape as Figure (i-2) with $\{v_2, v_4\} = V_0(\Gamma )$ , $\mathfrak L(v_3) \in \big \{Q_{i,1}, Q_{i,2}\big \}$ , $\mathfrak L(v_1) = \mathfrak L(v_5) \in \big \{Q_{i,1}, Q_{i,2}\big \} - \big \{\mathfrak L(v_3)\big \}$ , $g(v_3) = 1$ , $g(v_j) = 0$ for every $j \ne 3$ , and $2|d$ . There are exactly $2$ types of such graphs if we ignore the edge weights. By (5.12), $|\mathbf {A}_{\Gamma }| = d_1^2 d_2^2 \cdot |{\mathrm {Aut}} (\delta )|$ . By (5.32), (5.44), (5.34), (5.35) and (5.43), together with (5.37) and (5.38), we obtain
$$ \begin{align*}\sum_{\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d, i}, \, \text{Case (i-3)}} = -\frac{1}{108} \sum_{\delta \vdash d/2} \frac{d_1^2 + d_1d_2 + d_2^2}{d_1d_2 \cdot |\mathrm{Aut}(\delta)|} \cdot \gamma_{d_1}^2 \gamma_{d_2}^2 \cdot \frac{(w+z)^2}{wz} + M \big ((w+z)^3 \big ). \end{align*} $$
Next, the stable graphs $\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d, i}$ satisfying Lemma 5.9 (ii) are:
-
(ii)
$$ \begin{align*}\sum_{\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d, i}, \, \text{Case (ii)}} = \frac{4d-49}{216d} \cdot \gamma_{d/2}^2 \cdot \frac{(w+z)^2}{wz} + M \big ((w+z)^3 \big ). \end{align*} $$
The stable graphs $\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d, i}$ satisfying Lemma 5.9 (iii) are:
-
(iii-1)
$$ \begin{align*} \sum_{\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d, i}, \, \text{Case (iii-1)}} = \sum_{2d_1+3d_2=d} \frac{d_1d_2}{d^2} \cdot \gamma_{d_1}^2 {\widetilde \gamma}_{d_2} \cdot \frac{(w+z)^2}{wz} + M \big ((w+z)^3 \big ) \end{align*} $$where ${\widetilde \gamma }_{d_2} = 3$ if $2|d_2$ and ${\widetilde \gamma }_{d_2} = 1$ if $2 \nmid d_2$ .
-
(iii-2)
-
(iii-3) $\Gamma $ has the same shape as Figure (iii-2) with $\{v_1\} = V_0(\Gamma )$ , $\mathfrak L(v_2) = Q_{i,2}$ , $\mathfrak L(v_3) = Q_{i,1}$ , $\mathfrak L(v_4) = Q_{i,0}$ (respectively, $Q_{i,1}$ ), $2d_1 + d_2 = d$ (respectively, $2d_1 + 3d_2 = d$ ), $g(v_j) = 1$ for some $j \in \{2,3,4\}$ and $g(v_k) = 0$ if $k \ne j$ . There are exactly $6$ types of such graphs if we ignore the edge weights. We see that $\sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d, i}, \, \text {Case (iii-2)}} + \sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d, i}, \, \text {Case (iii-3)}}$ is equal to
$$ \begin{align*}\bigg (\sum_{2d_1+3d_2=d} \left (-\frac{d^2}{432d_1d_2} + \frac{1}{72} + \frac{d}{16d_1^3} + \frac{d_1^2}{54d d_2} \right ) \cdot \gamma_{d_1}^2 {\widetilde \gamma}_{d_2} \end{align*} $$$$ \begin{align*}+ \sum_{2d_1+d_2=d} \frac{(-1)^{d}(2d^2+d_2^2)}{216d_1(d_1+d_2)} \cdot \gamma_{d_1}^2 \gamma_{d_2} \bigg ) \cdot \frac{(w+z)^2}{wz} + M \big ((w+z)^3 \big ). \end{align*} $$
The stable graphs $\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d, i}$ satisfying Lemma 5.9 (iv) are:
-
(iv-1)
$$ \begin{align*}\left (\frac{(-1)^d}{24} \left ( \frac{5}{9} - \sum_{1 \le m \le d-1, m \ne d/3} \frac{d}{d-3m} \right ) - \frac{17 (-1)^d}{54d} \right ) \gamma_{d} \cdot \frac{(w+z)^2}{wz} + M \big ((w+z)^3 \big ). \end{align*} $$ -
(iv-2)
$$ \begin{align*}\sum_{\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d, i}, \, \text{Case (iv-2)}} = \frac{49-7d}{144d} \cdot {\widetilde \gamma}_{d/3} \cdot \frac{(w+z)^2}{wz} + M \big ((w+z)^3 \big ). \end{align*} $$
Finally, the stable graphs $\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d, i}$ satisfying Lemma 5.9 (v) are:
-
(v-1)
-
(v-2)
-
(v-3) $\Gamma $ has the same shape as Figure (v-2) with $\mathfrak L(v_1) = Q_{i,j_1}$ for some $j_1 \in \{0, 1, 2\}$ , $\mathfrak L(v_2) = Q_{i,j_2}$ and $\mathfrak L(v_3) = Q_{i,j_3}$ for some $j_2, j_3 \in \{0, 1, 2\} - \{j_1\}$ , $g(v_2) = 1$ , $g(v_1) = g(v_3) = 0$ and $d_1 \ne d_2$ if $j_1 = 0$ and $j_2 \ne j_3$ . There are exactly $12$ types of such graphs if we ignore the edge weights.
We see that the summation $\sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d, i}, \, \text {Case (v-1)}} + \sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d, i}, \, \text {Case (v-2)}} + \sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d, i}, \, \text {Case (v-3)}}$ is equal to the last three lines in the formula of $f_d$ in our lemma.
Example 5.11. Let $d = 1$ . Then, we have $|E(\Gamma )| = 1$ and $|V(\Gamma )| = 2$ for every stable graph $\Gamma \in {\mathcal S}_{d,i, i} \cup {\mathcal T}_{d,i}$ . If $\Gamma \in {\mathcal S}_{d,i, i}$ , then $\Gamma $ is one of the two stable graphs stated in the first paragraph in the proof of Lemma 5.7:
where $\mathfrak L(v_1) = R_{i, i}^{(1)}$ , $\mathfrak L(v_2) = R_{i, i}^{(2)}$ , $g(v_1) \in \{1, 0\}$ and $g(v_2) \in \{1, 0\} - \{g(v_1)\}$ . An easy computation shows that $\sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal S}_{d,i, i}}$ is equal to
where w and z denote $w_i$ and $z_i$ , respectively. Similarly, if $\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d,i}$ , then $\Gamma $ is one of the four stable graphs stated in Case (iv-1) in the proof of Lemma 5.10:
where $\mathfrak L(v_1) = Q_{i,0}$ , $\mathfrak L(v_2) \in \big \{Q_{i,1}, Q_{i,2} \big \}$ , $g(v_1) \in \{1, 0\}$ and $g(v_2) \in \{1, 0\} - \{g(v_1)\}$ . A straightforward but lengthy computation shows that
It follows that $\sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d,i}} = \sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d,i}, \,\, g(v_1) = 0} + \sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d,i}, \,\, g(v_1) = 1}$ is equal to
In particular, the constant $f_1$ in (5.47) is equal to $7/24$ , as asserted by Lemma 5.10. Combining with (5.48), we conclude that $\sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal T}_{d,i}} - \sum _{\Gamma \in {\mathcal S}_{d,i, i}}$ is equal to
Hence, we see from (5.19) that for a smooth projective toric surface X,
By Lemma 5.1, formula (5.49) holds for every smooth projective surface X.
It is unclear how to simplify the constant $f_d$ in Lemma 5.10 for a general $d \ge 1$ . Finally, we are able to determine the genus- $1$ extremal invariant $\langle \rangle _{1, d\beta _3}$ .
Theorem 5.12. Let X be a smooth projective surface. Let $d \ge 1$ , and let $f_d$ be the constant defined in Lemma 5.10. Then, $\langle \rangle _{1, d\beta _3}$ is equal to
where $\delta = (d_1, d_2) \vdash d$ denotes a length- $2$ partition of d.
Proof. By Lemma 5.1, $\langle \rangle _{1, d\beta _3} = (a_d + b_d \cdot \chi (X)) \cdot K_X^2$ where $a_d$ and $b_d$ are universal constants depending only on d. By (5.19), Lemma 5.4, Lemma 5.7 and Lemma 5.10, our theorem holds when X is a smooth projective toric surface. Therefore, the theorem holds for every smooth projective surface X.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Professors Hua-Zhong Ke and Wei-Ping Li for valuable discussions and assistance. The authors also would like to thank the referees for carefully reading the paper and providing valuable comments which have greatly improved the exposition of the paper.
Conflict of Interest
The authors have no conflict of interest to declare.
Funding statement
The research of the first author was partially supported by NSFC Grants [11831017, 11890662].