BPS states, knots and quivers

Abstract

We argue how to identify supersymmetric quiver quantum mechanics description of BPS states, which arise in string theory in brane systems representing knots. This leads to a surprising relation between knots and quivers: to a given knot we associate a quiver, so that various types of knot invariants are expressed in terms of characteristics of a moduli space of representations of the corresponding quiver. This statement can be regarded as a novel type of categorification of knot invariants, and among its various consequences we find that Labastida-Mariño-Ooguri-Vafa (LMOV) invariants of a knot can be expressed in terms of motivic Donaldson-Thomas invariants of the corresponding quiver; this proves integrality of LMOV invariants, conjectured originally based on string theory and M-theory arguments.

6 pages, 1 figure

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Differential expansion for link polynomials
• Branes, quivers and wave-functions
• Nahm sums, quiver A-polynomials and topological recursion
• Inverted state sums, inverted Habiro series, and indefinite theta functions
• Permutohedra for knots and quivers