Givental's Lagrangian cone and \(S^1\)--equivariant Gromov-Witten theory (Q932917)

By organizing the Gromov-Witten invariants into generating functions, one often discovers that the resulting potentials satisfy certain differential equations resulting in rather deep and mysterious identities among the invariants. One promising approach to understanding these differential operators is Givental's quantization formalism. This involves associating to each smooth projective variety \(X\) a symplectic vector space \({\mathcal H} = H^\bullet(X)\otimes {\mathbb C}((z^{-1}))\) and regarding the GW potentials as functions on \({\mathcal H}_+ = H^\bullet(X) [z]\) after making a certain change of variables called the dilation shift. In this framework, the differential operators are often seen as quantizations of rather simple linear transformations of the symplectic vector space \({\mathcal H},\) and the genus zero GW invariants are encoded by a certain Lagrangian cone \(\mathcal L\) in \(\mathcal H.\) The objective of this paper is to provide a geometric interpretation of quantization formalism, and the main result is a construction of the Lagrangian submanifold \(\mathcal L\) in terms of the \(S^1\)-equivariant Gromov-Witten theory of \(X \times {\mathbb P}^1.\) The author proves that \(\mathcal L\) is obtained by pushing forward a certain class obtained by fixed point localization and he gives a description of the dilation shift in terms of contributions to the push forward coming from certain exceptional fixed loci. These results make essential use of a localization result in equivariant Borel-Moore homology, and the author provides all the background material and a complete proof of this result in the appendix.