6.1 Fukaya category for embedded exact Lagrangians [04GR]
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6.1 Fukaya category for embedded exact Lagrangians
Floer cohomology and -structure with mod 2 coefficients
Let be a Stein manifold, namely a Kähler manifold with for a plurisubharmonic exhaustion function . In particular, is an exact symplectic manifold, meaning , where is the Liouville 1-form. All almost complex structure perturbations are assumed to agree with the fixed complex structure outside some compact set.
Given two transversely intersecting exact embedded6262 62 In our terminology, embedded Lagrangians are always connected, while immersed Lagrangians can have disconnected domains. Lagrangians with potential , namely and , and some extra brane data, one can associate an algebraic invariant called the Floer cohomology. A general feature of Floer theory, is that the constructions depend on many auxiliary choices, but the invariants depend on only a small number of data, and should always be invariant under global Hamiltonian isotopies.
We assume and let be a complex volume form on . We shall always assume the Lagrangians to be graded, namely the phase function lifts to a real valued function. The grading is part of the brane data. Working first with coefficients, the Floer cohomology can be defined as the cohomology of a complex . Here is generated by the transverse intersection points , whose degrees are given by
| (63) |
where we put the tangent planes of inside into the standard form
Notice if we reverse the role of , then we can regard , but this affects the degree by . For alternative formulations of the degree in terms of Lagrangian Grassmannians, see [68].
Remark 6.1.
The degree convention here follows Joyce [41], which corresponds to in [69][9][73]. The advantage of this convention is its compatibility with the central charge formula in the Bridgeland stability. If instead one uses the convention of [69][9][73], then adding to the Lagrangian phase would correspond to the shift in , so the central charge would be .
Remark 6.2.
For almost calibrated Lagrangians , whence . Since the degrees are always integers, we must have .
We consider the moduli space of finite energy holomorphic strips with ends at and boundary on , in the homotopy class :
Index theory of the Cauchy-Riemann operator with Lagrangian boundary conditions implies this moduli space has virtual dimension . The holomorphic strip equation is invariant under domain translation in the direction. Using generic domain dependent almost complex structures which are fixed outside a large compact set, one can achieve suitable transversality on the moduli spaces, and in particular are isolated points for . A key advantage of the exact setting is that the energy can be computed a priori by the topological formula:
| (64) |
By Gromov compactness, the number of isolated points is finite, and only finitely many homotopy classes admit holomorphic strips. To save some notations, we sometimes write .
Remark 6.3.
The role of convexity assumptions at the infinity of (such as the existence of a plurisubharmonic exhaustion function) is to ensure that for a finite given collection of Lagrangians, all holomorphic curves remain inside a fixed bounded region. This is needed to apply Gromov compactness.
Remark 6.4.
More generally, one can add a Hamiltonian term in the Cauchy-Riemann equation, and replace transverse intersection points by Hamiltonian chords. The Cauchy-Riemann equation then gets modified to the Floer equation
| (65) |
where is a Hamiltonian vector field. This perturbation is not needed for Floer theoretic transversality statements if and are already transverse, but is an essential ingredient in showing the Hamiltonian invariance of Floer cohomology.
Remark 6.5.
We generally distinguish between the end, and the end. The main difference is the ordering of the Lagrangians at the intersection point. Here we are following the Joyce convention [41], which is opposite to Auroux [9]. This is dictated by compatibility with the degree formula (63). Similarly, later the product also requires the Lagrangian boundaries to be ordered clockwise, as opposed to the counterclockwise convention in Auroux [9].
The Floer differential is where is the mod 2 count of . The key fact of Floer theory is that . For this, one considers the holomorphic strips between with , modulo the translation invariance direction. This moduli space is one-dimensional. Generally in Floer theory, the boundary of the compactified moduli spaces comes from disc breaking and disc and sphere bubbling. The latter is ruled out for energy reasons by the exactness assumption, and the former gives
In terms of mod 2 counts, , namely . This fact allows one to take the cohomology, which is . Although suppressed in this notation, the homotopy classes of discs are additive under disc breaking. This fact allows one to introduce some extra weighting factors involving energy and holonomy of local systems.
The general strategy to show the Floer cohomology is independent of the choices of almost complex structures and Hamiltonian perturbations, is to consider continuity equations, whose counts define chain maps at the level of , so descend to comparison maps between Floer cohomologies defined by different auxiliary data (cf. Auroux [8, section 1.5]).
Floer cohomology admits rich algebraic structures, but the deeper structure is better set up at the chain level . We temporarily avoid the issue of signs and self Floer cohomology. The Fukaya category can be seen as the generalization of Floer cohomology in two directions:
- •
We allow the interplay of many (transverse) Lagrangians. Each Lagrangian is labelled by an object in the Fukaya category. This labelling is the main difference between an algebra and a category.
- •
The holomorphic strips are replaced by holomorphic polygons, with boundary segments mapped to a clockwise ordered sequence of at least three Lagrangians , and clockwise ordered boundary marked points mapped to the Lagrangian intersection points . We distinguish as the output, and regard as inputs. The marked points on the boundary of the domain disc are fixed, while the other marked points are allowed to move freely preserving their cyclic ordering.
The moduli spaces of such polygons (with suitably domain dependent perturbations) are denoted as . Moduli spaces with at least three marked points do not have the domain translation invariance, so there is no need to divide by .
Remark 6.6.
From the viewpoint of gluing theory, it is convenient to regard the boundary marked points of the holomorphic polygons as punctures, where the Riemann surface structure is locally modelled on strip like ends. The moduli of abstract holomorphic polygons with marked points has a compactification known as the Stasheff associahedron . On account of the geometric picture of polygons in , we often refer to the strip like ends as corners.
The energy formula (64) generalizes to the holomorphic polygon case:
| (66) |
The virtual dimension formula is
| (67) |
Here comes from the index theory of the Cauchy-Riemann operator, and comes from the freedom to move the marked points on the boundary. Under suitable domain dependent perturbation schemes, in this exact setting one can ensure transversality, so that the moduli space is smooth. For setting up the Fukaya category, the zero dimensional moduli spaces are particularly important, since counting points give rise to operations, and 1-dimensional moduli spaces are important for producing -relations. In the main text, we have also given considerable attention to -dimensional moduli spaces, since these are relevant for producing bordism currents.
Within the exact setting, disc and sphere bubbling is impossible. After compactification, the moduli space of holomorphic polygons can have two kinds of boundaries, due to two kinds of disc breaking:
- •
(Disc breaking at the corners) The disc may break at . The polygons near the breaking limit are obtained from gluing polygons with corners mapped to , and strips with boundary on and two ends mapped to . (Of course, disc breaking can also happen at the outgoing corner .)
- •
(Disc splitting at the edges) When there are at least 4 Lagrangians, the domain disc can split into two discs with and marked points. The edges of one disc map to , with cyclically marked points mapping to and . The edges of the other disc map to , with marked points mapping to and .
When disc breaking and disc splitting are taken into account, the moduli spaces can be compactified into . We then have
| (68) |
In particular, the (virtual) dimensions of both sides are equal, which constrains .
Remark 6.7.
More generally, disc breaking and disc splitting can happen in a bubble tree fashion. Such multiple splitting/breaking do not concern us, because under sufficient transversality conditions, they occur only in codimension at least two in the moduli space. To set up Fukaya categories in the exact setting, only zero and one dimensional moduli spaces are needed, so the multiple bubble trees do not occur. When we make use of higher dimensional moduli spaces in the main text, the bubble trees do occur, but the codimension two condition means the deeper boundary strata do not contribute to the boundary of the bordism current, in the sense of currents.
The -structure is the algebraization of the disc breaking/splitting phenomenon. It consists of multilinear maps
satisfying the -relation
Here is the degree one Floer differential , and for the operation is defined by counting holomorphic polygons in moduli spaces of virtual dimension zero,
Virtual dimension zero requires , which explains the degree of . The -relation is the direct translation of (68), with disc breaking at corners contributing the terms, and disc splitting contributing the other terms.
The first few -relations have clear geometric meanings:
- •
The Floer differential squares to zero.
- •
The Floer product satisfies the Leibniz rule. As such descends to a product structure on the mod 2 coefficient Floer cohomology .
- •
The is associative up to a homotopy given by the terms. In particular the Floer product is associative on cohomology.
The higher structures naturally lead to the Fukaya category of embedded exact Lagrangians. This requires some discussion on signs, brane structures, and self Floer cohomologies.
Self Floer cohomology
It is desirable to take Floer cohomology of with itself. One major feature of is that it contains units, at least at cohomological level.
One challenge to implement self Floer cohomology is that is not transverse to itself, so the Cauchy-Riemann equation needs perturbation. There are many frameworks to address this problem, and one idea dating back to Floer is to use the Hamiltonian invariance of Floer cohomology, to think of self Floer cohomology via where is the time one flow of the small generic Hamiltonian [9, section 1.6]. For , the Lagrangian can be identified as a graph over inside , the transverse intersection are the critical points of , and a suitable setup of the Floer trajectories (65) can be identified as Morse flowlines of . Thus is isomorphic to the Morse cohomology of , so . In the exact case, the ring structure on defined from perturbed holomorphic triangles agrees with the cup product ring structure on . The unit can be represented by the Morse generator of , or more non-perturbatively via the Piunikhin-Salamon-Schwarz map.
It takes some effort to promote the self Floer cohomology to the Fukaya category framework, and ensure the consistency in the perturbation schemes (cf. Auroux [9, section 2.1] for a sketch and Seidel [69] for details). In applications it is often more convenient to avoid Hamiltonian perturbations as much as possible.
Example 6.1.
(Floer products involving the identity) We wish to heuristically explain a special case relevant to Joyce-Imagi-Santos (cf. section 2.3), concerning the geometric interpretation of the Floer product mod 2
Here are assumed to be transverse. Hamiltonian invariance means we can alternatively think of
This is defined by the count of holomorphic triangles with input corners at , , and an output corner at . We may assume the Morse function has only one maximum point on , which represents the unit of . When , then and coincide, and the holomorphic triangles become holomorphic strips with ends at , (alternatively seen as a degree output) and passing through the point . This last incidence condition is independent of the position of on , since we can choose to have its maximum at any generic prescribed point. Notice in this strip interpretation, there is no longer any Hamiltonian perturbation. This interpretation featured in Lemma 2.7.
Sign issues and brane structures
To go beyond mod 2 coefficients, we need to orient moduli spaces. Good references can be found in Seidel’s book [69] and Abouzaid [3, Appendix]. All Lagrangians are assumed to be graded, with second Stiefel-Whitney class equal to the restriction of a fixed class in , and we equip the Lagrangians with relative spin structures. At any transverse Lagrangian intersection point , there is a unique up to homotopy path of Lagrangian planes in with graded lift interpolating and . We fix a relative spin structure on , compatible with the relative spin structure on . We can associate a vector space as the determinant line of the Cauchy-Riemann operator on the upper half plane with boundary data . The dual of is denoted , namely canonically. The orientation line is the free abelian group generated by the two possible orientations of with the relation that their sum vanishes. Furthermore, we equip the Lagrangians with (rank one) local systems , and write the Floer cochain complex as the graded vector space
Remark 6.8.
There are some variants on the coefficient ring/field of the local system. The simplest case is the trivial local system, in which case we simply delete the factor. Other popular choices have parallel transport in , or the units in the Novikov ring.6363 63 The -local systems are popular in the physics literature, but appear rarely in Floer theory. Different choices could in principle lead to slightly different versions of the derived Fukaya category. The smaller the coefficient ring/field, the more stringent is the notion of derived isomorphism of objects. For the purpose of extending the Solomon functional (cf. section 20) to be real valued, we require all coefficients to be at least contained in , so we will usually work simultaneously with , and local systems. On the other hand, it is claimed in [81, Remark 4.5] that in the exact setting the immersed Fukaya algebras can be defined over the integers. The specific advantage of working over integers, as discussed in the main text, is primarily that the bordism current between Lagrangians is then an integral current, rather than -linear combinations of integral currents.
Given a holomorphic polygon , with inputs and output mapping to and , the det line of the linearized Cauchy-Riemann operator can be computed from gluing kernel and cokernels:
The role of the relative spin structure, is to specify a homotopically unique choice of isotopy between the glued operator and (i.e. an isotopy between Lagrangian boundary conditions), hence a preferred isomorphism
The tangent space of the moduli space of holomorphic polygons involves not only the linearized Cauchy-Riemann operator, but also the variation of the complex structure of the domain of the polygon, controlled by the Stasheff associahedron . Denote as the top wedge product of a vector space . Then there are preferred isomorphisms depending on the relative spin structure choice
| (69) |
Remark 6.9.
Fixing an orientation on , then is naturally dual to . The local system factor is naturally dual to . Given a Lagrangian path associated to a Lagrangian intersection , the reverse path is also associated with a determinant line bundle, which can be identified with
since the two half planes with Lagrangian boundaries can be glued to a disk, such that the det line of the Cauchy-Riemann operator is canonically isomorphic to .
For , when the moduli spaces are zero dimensional, so carry canonical orientations, then a universal orientation choice for determines an operator
In our degree conventions the corners on the domain disc boundary are ordered clockwise, so a natural orientation on the Stasheff associahedron can be obtained by fixing and allowing the other corner points to move in the clockwise orientation. The parallel transports along the local systems contribute another factor
Each pseudoholomorphic polygon contributes to the operation
via the tensor product of the orientation factor and the local system factor, multiplied by another sign factor depending only on the degrees (cf. [69, equation (12.24)])
In the case of holomorphic strips, we have a natural isomorphism
| (70) |
where is the translation vector field pointing towards the input point. When consists of isolated points, it carries canonical orientations, whence by (69) we obtain
The local system parallel transport produces another factor
Each pseudoholomorphic strip contributes to the Floer differential
by the product of these two factors. We write
When the signs and local system weighting factors are taken into account, the -relation reads
| (71) |
where . The Fukaya category for the compact embedded Lagrangians comprises of the following data:
- •
The objects are embedded Lagrangians (with additional brane data, such as grading, Lagrangian potential, orientation, relative spin structure, and local system).
- •
The morphisms are the vector spaces (where can coincide with ).
- •
The -composition maps are the multilinear maps satisfying the relations.
The Fukaya category is an example of an -category.
In particular, the Floer differential squares to zero, so we can define the Floer cohomology groups for embedded exact Lagrangian branes. The Floer product on cohomology is given by
which is associative.
Example 6.2.
(Floer products involving the identity, continued) In the context of Example 6.1, the orientation isomorphism (69) for the holomorphic triangle is determined by whether the isotopy of the Lagrangian boundary conditions respects the relative spin structure. Since the relative spin structure on is induced from , this problem is equivalent to the corresponding isotopy problem for the limiting holomophic strip. The holonomy factor of the local systems for the holomorphic triangle, is also reduced to that of the limiting strip.
In the simplest case when we are given closed elements each involving only one intersection point, the local systems are trivial, and only one holomorphic curve contributes to the Floer product, then means that for the holomorphic strip from to passing through a generically chosen point , the Lagrangian boundary condition on the disk obtained by gluing and the two Lagrangian paths at the two strip like ends, can be contracted to constant, respecting the prescribed relative spin structures on and the two ends. More generally, many intersections points and holomorphic strips may contribute to the Floer product, and means a weighted signed count of holomophic strips is equal to one.
Under sufficient transversality assumptions, we can form the dimensional moduli space of holomorphic strips from to , and thereby produce an -dimensional universal family , as in the main text section 3.1. Using the relative spin structures on and the Lagrangian paths associated with the ends, we use (69)(70) and Remark 6.9 to induce a canonical orientation on the moduli space from . Using the complex orientation on the holomorphic curve , and inserting an extra minus sign, we obtain an orientation on . This tricky minus sign accounts for the difference between the counterclockwise orientation of compatible with the complex orientation, and the clockwise orientation of compatible on the -boundary with the translation vector field . Putting everything together, means in the sense of weighted counts, that passes once through a generic point in the same orientation as . In other words, the -boundary evaluation of sweeps out the oriented cycle .
The same argument says that if , then the moduli space of holomorphic strips from to produces a universal family , whose -boundary evaluation map sweeps out the oriented cycle . The subtle point is that due to the reversal of the -translation vector fields, has the reverse orientation as . Therefore, the -boundary evaluation of sweeps out the oriented cycle instead of . Here ends the example.
Twisted complexes, distinguished triangles, derived category
A fundamental problem of the embedded Fukaya category is that it lacks enough geometric objects. Morally, Fukaya category is a construction that inputs the symplectic geometry of Lagrangian branes, and outputs the representation theory of an -category. Now the general feature of -module categories is that one can take cones and idempotent summands, two properties which are useful for classifying such categories, and desirable for mirror symmetry. The problem is that cones and idempotent summands are not obviously represented by embedded Lagrangian objects under the Yoneda embedding. The common solution is to sideline this issue by the formal algebraic construction of twisted complexes and idempotent completions. This is not quite adequate for the Thomas-Yau conjecture. However, we will discuss how the introduction of immersed Lagrangian objects geometrizes the twisted complexes (cf. section 6.2). The geometric meaning of idempotents is an open problem.
The formal algebraic constructions are well explained in [9, section 3] and [73, section 4], to which we refer the reader for more details. Given objects of the Fukaya category , a twisted complex consists of
- •
The formal shifted direct sum with formally keeping track of degrees (the geometric meaning of the shift is to add a constant to the Lagrangian phase, which reverses the orientation of the Lagrangian, with a corresponding twist to the spin structure),
- •
and a strictly triangular differential , i.e. a collection of maps for ,6464 64 In most symplectic references such as [9] the morphisms go in the opposite direction . This just amounts to reversing the ordering of . We find our reversed convention a little more convenient for the Harder-Narasimhan decomposition.
satisfying the equation
Notice the strict triangularity implies the sum is finite. One can define morphisms between these twisted complexes, and assign -structures to make twisted complexes into an -category , into which naturally embeds fully faithfully. Using the -structure, it makes sense to talk about closed morphisms and cohomologies, similar to the construction of Floer cohomology.
Given twisted complexes , and a closed morphism , the abstract mapping cone of is the twisted complex
Generally, a mapping cone of is an object of quasi-isomorphic to . This gives rise to a distinguished triangle . This illustrates the advantage of introducing twisted complexes: is a triangulated category.
The cohomological category of is commonly denoted . This has the same objects as , but the Floer cochain spaces are replaced by their , namely we remember the Floer cohomology.
Under the Yoneda embedding, embedds into its module category. The idempotent closure is obtained by formally adding the direct summands of the Yoneda image of twisted complexes in . The cohomological category of is commonly denoted . In the variant setting of compact , it is usually instead of that shows up in mirror symmetry, since the derived category of coherent sheaves is automatically idempotent closed.
Remark 6.10.
Once immersed Lagrangians are admitted as objects of Fukaya categories, the twisted complexes are largely redundant. Joyce [41, conjecture 3.6] claims that by including immersed and singular Lagrangians with rank one local systems, then is automatically idempotent closed, so there is no difference between and . However, it is highly nonobvious why direct summands are Yoneda represented by geometric Lagrangian objects,6565 65 There exist some wild speculations, such as incorporating coisotropic branes into the Fukaya category in order to have more geometric objects. so this claim is regarded by many experts as a weakness of Joyce’s proposal. For this reason, in our more restrictive proposal we stick with the more geometric (including immersed and singular objects, but not formal idempotent summands) in favour of , and the idempotent closure problem does not falsify our program.