A GLSM view on homological projective duality (Q2160234)

In most circumstances, different geometric phases of a GLSM are related by flop-transformations. But it has been noticed that there are exceptions, where the geometric entities of different phases are related by homological projective duality. It was a puzzle when and why this scenario happens. This paper gives a clear explanation to this puzzle in field theoretic language. For a projective embedding that can be described by a GLSM, the authors constructed a GLSM with extended gauge group and matter content, whose geometric phase realizes the universal hyperplane section of the projective embedding. Using an argument based on transport of B-branes (matrix factorizations) across certain phase boundary, they showed that the category of B-branes of the Higgs branch, which is described by a hybrid model, of another phase is equivalent to the homological projective dual category. Upon taking linear sections, the GLSM reduces to known examples in which the phases are related by homological projective duality, such as those for the Calabi-Yau manifolds as the intersections of quadrics in projective spaces. From this construction, a series of GLSMs realizing homological projective duality can be constructed. The paper listed some examples including the linear and Veronese embedding of projective spaces, Fano complete intersections and Plücker embedding, where in the last case it incorporates the Grassmannian/Pfaffian correspondence.