Refined Wall-Crossing, Free Fermions and Crystal Melting

We describe wall-crossing for local, toric Calabi-Yau manifolds without compact four-cycles, in terms of free fermions, vertex operators, and crystal melting. Firstly, to each such manifold we associate two states in the free fermion Hilbert space. The overlap of these states reproduces the BPS partition function corresponding to the non-commutative Donaldson-Thomas invariants, given by the modulus square of the topological string partition function. Secondly, we introduce th...

We review free fermion, melting crystal and matrix model representations of wall-crossing phenomena on local, toric Calabi-Yau manifolds. We consider both unrefined and refined BPS counting of closed BPS states involving D2 and D0-branes bound to a D6-brane, as well as open BPS states involving open D2-branes ending on an additional D4-brane. Appropriate limit of these constructions provides, among the others, matrix model representation of refined and unrefined topological s...

This paper summarizes recent developments in the theory of Bogomol'nyi-Prasad-Sommerfield (BPS) state counting and the wall crossing phenomena, emphasizing in particular the role of the statistical mechanical model of crystal melting. This paper is divided into two parts, which are closely related to each other. In the first part, we discuss the statistical mechanical model of crystal melting counting BPS states. Each of the BPS state contributing to the BPS index is in one-t...

It is well known that in string compactifications on toric Calabi-Yau manifolds one can introduce refined BPS invariants that carry information not only about the charge of the BPS state but also about the spin content. In this paper we study how these invariants behave under wall crossing. In particular, by applying a refined wall crossing formula, we obtain the refined BPS degeneracies for the conifold in different chambers. The result can be interpreted in terms of a new s...

Consider the degeneracies of BPS bound states of one D6 brane wrapping Calabi-Yau X with D0 branes and D2 branes. When we include D4-branes wrapping Lagrangian cycle L in addition, D2-branes can end on them. These give rise to new bound states in the d=2, N=(2,2) theory of the D4 branes. We call these "open" BPS states, in contrast to closed BPS states that arise from D-branes without boundaries. Lifting this to M-theory, we show that the generating function is captured by fr...

We survey geometrical and especially combinatorial aspects of generalized Donaldson-Thomas invariants (also called BPS invariants) for toric Calabi-Yau manifolds, emphasizing the role of plane partitions and their generalizations in the recently proposed crystal melting model. We also comment on equivalence with a vicious walker model and the matrix model representation of the partition function.

We propose a generalization of the topological vertex, which we call the "non-commutative topological vertex". This gives open BPS invariants for a toric Calabi-Yau manifold without compact 4-cycles, where we have D0/D2/D6-branes wrapping holomorphic 0/2/6-cycles, as well as D2-branes wrapping disks whose boundaries are on D4-branes wrapping non-compact Lagrangian 3-cycles. The vertex is defined combinatorially using the crystal melting model proposed recently, and depends on...

We study the counting problem of BPS D-branes wrapping holomorphic cycles of a general toric Calabi-Yau manifold. We evaluate the Jeffrey-Kirwan residues for the flavoured Witten index for the supersymmetric quiver quantum mechanics on the worldvolume of the D-branes, and find that BPS degeneracies are described by a statistical mechanical model of crystal melting. For Calabi-Yau threefolds, we reproduce the crystal melting models long known in the literature. For Calabi-Yau ...

We consider wall-crossing phenomena associated to the counting of D2-branes attached to D4-branes wrapping lagrangian cycles in Calabi-Yau manifolds, both from M-theory and matrix model perspective. Firstly, from M-theory viewpoint, we review that open BPS generating functions in various chambers are given by a restriction of the modulus square of the open topological string partition functions. Secondly, we show that these BPS generating functions can be identified with inte...

We study the refined and unrefined crystal/BPS partition functions of D6-D2-D0 brane bound states for all toric Calabi-Yau threefolds without compact 4-cycles and some non-toric examples. They can be written as products of (generalized) MacMahon functions. We check our expressions and use them as vacuum characters to study the gluings. We then consider the wall crossings and discuss possible crystal descriptions for different chambers. We also express the partition functions ...