Vincent
Bouchard
University of Alberta
W-constraints for the ancestor potential of (r,s)-theta classes
Abstract.
Witten’s conjecture, which was proved by Kontsevich, states that the generating series for intersection numbers on the moduli space of curves is a tau-function for the KdV integrable hierarchy. It can be reformulated as the statement that the ancestor potential of the trivial cohomological field theory is the unique solution to a system of differential constraints that form a representation of the Virasoro algebra. In this talk I will present a new generalization of this celebrated result. The object of study becomes the ancestor potential of an interesting set of cohomology classes on the moduli space of curves, called (r,s) theta classes, which form a non-semisimple cohomological field theory. (Here, r is a positive integer and s is a positive integer between 1 and r-1.) The (r,s) theta classes are constructed as the top Chern classes of the Chiodo classes, and can be understood as a higher generalization of the Norbury classes. We show that the ancestor potential is the solution of a system of differential constraints that form a representation of a W-algebra. However, the differential constraints form an Airy structure (and thus uniquely fix the ancestor potential) only in the cases s=1 and s=r-1. An equivalent way of stating this result is that we determine loop equations satisfied by the correlators for all (r,s), but only when s=1 or s=r-1 are the loop equations uniquely solved by (shifted) topological recursion.
This talk is based on work in progress with N. K. Chidambaram, A. Giacchetto and S. Shadrin and previous work by many people such as https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.09120, https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.02608, https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.15621, https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.08738, to name a few.