Homological mirror symmetry

Homological mirror symmetry is a mathematical conjecture made by Maxim Kontsevich. It seeks a systematic mathematical explanation for a phenomenon called mirror symmetry first observed by physicists studying string theory.

History

In an address to the 1994 International Congress of Mathematicians in Zürich, Kontsevich (1994) speculated that mirror symmetry for a pair of Calabi–Yau manifolds X and Y could be explained as an equivalence of a triangulated category constructed from the algebraic geometry of X (the derived category of coherent sheaves on X) and another triangulated category constructed from the symplectic geometry of Y (the derived Fukaya category).

Edward Witten originally described the topological twisting of the N=(2,2) supersymmetric field theory into what he called the A and B model topological string theories. These models concern maps from Riemann surfaces into a fixed target—usually a Calabi–Yau manifold. Most of the mathematical predictions of mirror symmetry are embedded in the physical equivalence of the A-model on Y with the B-model on its mirror X. When the Riemann surfaces have empty boundary, they represent the worldsheets of closed strings. To cover the case of open strings, one must introduce boundary conditions to preserve the supersymmetry. In the A-model, these boundary conditions come in the form of Lagrangian submanifolds of Y with some additional structure (often called a brane structure). In the B-model, the boundary conditions come in the form of holomorphic (or algebraic) submanifolds of X with holomorphic (or algebraic) vector bundles on them. These are the objects one uses to build the relevant categories. They are often called A and B branes respectively. Morphisms in the categories are given by the massless spectrum of open strings stretching between two branes.