A product formula for log Gromov-Witten invariants (Q1743701)

In recent years, logarithmic (log) geometry has come to the fore in understanding Mirror Symmetry. In particular, log curves allows one to make precise the notion of open strings in a much wider range of circumstances than previous constructions. This framework produces log Gromov-Witten invariants, a variant of Gromov-Witten invariants incorporating tangency conditions. Unfortunately, calculating such invariants is typically at least as hard as calculating Gromov-Witten invariants. Given a stable map \(f:C \rightarrow V \times W\) one can construct via contractions stable maps to \(V\) and to \(W\). Therefore one could ask if there is a way to reconstruct stable maps on \(V \times W\) from stable maps to each factor. The exact method for how to do this was found by Kai Behrend. Together with degeneration techniques this provides a good way to calculate Gromov-Witten invariants. In this paper, the authors study the same problem in the logarithmic world, restricting to the case that \(V\) has trivial log structure. Phrased in terms of log geometry, this restriction says that \(V\) is strict over a point. Strictness is an important log-geometric property, for instance fibre products where one of the maps is strict can be constructed from the usual fibre product of schemes. The authors use this simplification of the log fibre product to identify the moduli spaces involved. In the penultimate section they speculate on what goes wrong in the general case but are able to reduce the problem to study nice models. Using their techniques it reduces to proving their formula only for smooth and log smooth schemes. The final section of this paper relates the formula to known work in other descriptions of the open string theory, in particular to the relative Gromov-Witten theory of Li and Li-Ruan.