Two point extremal Gromov-Witten invariants of Hilbert schemes of points on surfaces (Q532540)

In the paper under review, the authors compute two point extremal Gromov-Witten invariants of Hilbert schemes of points on surfaces, and determine the extremal quantum boundary operator. The main ideas are to use the localized virtual fundamental cycle and to apply the results of Okounkov-Pandharipande on the quantum cohomology of Hilbert schemes of points on the affine plane \(\mathbb C^2\). In Section 2, the authors review standard results about the Hilbert schemes \(X^{[n]}\) of points on smooth algebraic surfaces \(X\), and mentioned Ruan's Cohomological Crepant Resolution Conjecture. In Section 3, based on methods of Kiem-J. Li, some reduction lemmas about the localized virtual fundamental cycle of stable maps to \(X^{[n]}\) were proved. These stable maps are extremal in the sense that their images are contracted to points by the Hilbert-Chow morphisms. In Section 4, a universal formula about two point extremal Gromov-Witten invariants of \(X^{[n]}\) is established. In Section 5 and Section 6, the authors studies the extremal quantum boundary operator, and determines it when \(X\) is the projective plane \(\mathbb P^2\). In Section 7, two point extremal Gromov-Witten invariants and the extremal quantum boundary operator for an arbitrary surface \(X\) are computed. These results are then applied to partially confirm Ruan's conjecture.