Combinatorial duality for Poincaré series, polytopes and invariants of plumbed 3-manifolds (Q1730269)

The authors use a symmetry of the topological zeta function and a reciprocity of polytopes to obtain a generalization of Seiberg-Witten invariants for some normal surface singularities. In particular this simplifies the computation of the (original) Seiberg-Witten invariants. Take a normal surface singularity whose link, \(M\), is a rational homology sphere. The Seiberg-Witten invariant is computable from the resolution graph in a complicated way. First one builds the multi-variable topological zeta function \(\mathcal{Z}(\mathbf{t})\). The homology \(H:=H_1(M,\mathbb{Z})\) indexes the \(Spin^c\)-structure, and there is the natural decomposition \(\mathcal{Z}=\sum_{h\in H}\mathcal{Z}_h\). From the parts \(\{\mathcal{Z}_h\}\) one obtains certain quasi-polynomials. The value of each such quasi-polynomial at the origin is called the ``periodic constant \(pc(\mathcal{Z}_h)\) of \(\mathcal{Z}_h\)''. This \(pc(\mathcal{Z}_h)\) gives the Seiberg-Witten invariant corresponding to the \(h\)-spin structure. The authors show that in fact \(pc(\mathcal{Z}_h)\) is an easy explicit sum of the coefficients of the ``dual'' series \(\mathcal{Z}_{[Z_K]-h}\), where \([Z_K]-h\in H\) is the Gorenstein-dual of \(h\). Moreover, they establish the (unique, canonical) decomposition \(\mathcal{Z}_h=\mathcal{Z}_h^{neg}+P^+_h\). Here \(\mathcal{Z}^{neg}_h\) is a rational function ``with negative degree'', while \(P^+_h\) is a polynomial satisfying: \(P^+_h(1)=pc(\mathcal{Z}_h)\). Therefore \(P^+_h\) gives a multi-variable polynomial generalization of the (corresponding) Seiberg-Witten invariant. The authors determine \(P^+_h\) via the lattice points of some related polytopes. This is the topological analogue of the classical geometric genus formulae of Khovanskii and Morales.