The moduli space of maps with crosscaps: the relative signs of the natural automorphisms (Q326636)

In the paper, the authors determine the relative signs of the automorphisms of some spaces they introduced in [Commun. Anal. Geom. 23, No. 3, 499--558 (2015; Zbl 1441.14181)], namely the moduli spaces of maps from surfaces with crosscaps, induced by interchanging the boundary components of the domain and by the anti-symplectic involution on the target manifold. These sign computations yield an extension of some recent Floer-theoretic applications of anti-symplectic involutions. The reviewed paper is divided in five sections. In the introduction, basic considerations of \(J\)-holomorphic maps and orientability in real Gromov-Witten theory are recalled together with the main references on this topic, and some central theorems of the paper, concerning the orientability of moduli spaces of real genus-1 maps and of the real maps with separating fixed locus, are stated. Section 2 is devoted to preliminary notions and analytic tools connected to Fredholm theory for oriented sh-surfaces, then to the computations of the signs of natural automorphisms on the Deligne-Mumford moduli spaces of bordered Riemann surfaces, which yield a central proposition of the paper. At the end of this section, the authors make some topological observations, which are useful for the orientability problem in Gromov-Witten theory. In Section 3, some basic notions in equivariant cohomology are recalled, and several properties of the equivariant \(w_2^\phi\) of real bundle pairs over surfaces are investigated. More exactly, the real bundle pairs over the torus and the Klein bottle with some fixed-point-free involutions are classified, and \(w_2^\phi\) of all rank-1 real bundle pairs over symmetric surfaces with fixed-point-free involutions are computed. In the fourth section, on local orientations of index bundles of real Cauchy-Riemann operators, the authors study the conjugation and interchanges of boundary components. They show when the deck transformations of the coverings of moduli spaces (of a real map from a symmetric surface to a symplectic manifold with an anti-symplectic involution by moduli spaces of a map from an oriented sh-surface) are orientation-preserving. In Section 5, the authors introduce a weaker version of spin structures and prove that relative spin sub-structures induce orientations on moduli spaces of open maps. By using the propositions obtained in Sections 2 and 4, they prove that relative spin sub-structures compatible with an involution \(\phi\) induce orientations preserved by the natural automorphisms of the moduli spaces of maps from surfaces with crosscaps. Thus, they generalize the theorems stated in the introduction. Following the approach from [\textit{K. Fukaya} et al., ``Anti-symplectic involution and Floer cohomology'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:0912.2646}], the authors extend the disk case of the propositions from Section 4 to Floer homology, by using anti-symplectic involutions on the target.