This work is devoted to the study of the foundations of quantum K-theory, a K-theoretic version of quantum cohomology theory. In particular, it gives a deformation of the ordinary K-ring K(X) of a smooth projective variety X, analogous to the relation between quantum cohomology and ordinary cohomology. This new quantum product also gives a new class of Frobenius manifolds.

In this article we study a conjecture of Geiss-Leclerc-Schröer, which is an analogue of a classical conjecture of Lusztig in the Weyl group case. It concerns the relation between canonical basis and semi-canonical basis through the characteristic cycles. We formulate an approach to this conjecture and prove it for type quiver. In the general type A case, we reduce the conjecture to show that certain nearby cycles have vanishing Euler characteristic.

In this article we propose a geometric description of Arthur packets for p-adic groups using vanishing cycles of perverse sheaves. Our approach is inspired by the 1992 book by Adams, Barbasch and Vogan on the Langlands classification of admissible representations of real groups and follows the direction indicated by Vogan in his 1993 paper on the Langlands correspondence. Using vanishing cycles, we introduce and study a functor from the category of equivariant perverse sheaves on the moduli space of certain Langlands parameters to local systems on the regular part of the conormal bundle for this variety. In this article we establish the main properties of this functor and show that it plays the role of microlocalization in the work of Adams, Barbasch and Vogan. We use this to define ABV-packets for pure rational forms of p-adic groups and propose a geometric description of the transfer coefficients that appear in Arthur's main local result in the endoscopic classification of representations. This article includes conjectures modelled on Vogan's work, especially the prediction that Arthur packets are ABV-packets for p-adic groups. We gather evidence for these conjectures by verifying them in numerous examples.

We study hybrid models arising as homological projective duals (HPD) of certain projective embeddings f:X→P(V) of Fano manifolds X. More precisely, the category of B-branes of such hybrid models corresponds to the HPD category of the embedding f. B-branes on these hybrid models can be seen as global matrix factorizations over some compact space B or, equivalently, as the derived category of the sheaf of A-modules on B, where A is an A_∞ algebra. This latter interpretation corresponds to a noncommutative resolution of B. We compute explicitly the algebra A by several methods, for some specific class of hybrid models, and find that in general it takes the form of a smash product of an A_∞ algebra with a cyclic group. Then we apply our results to the HPD of f corresponding to a Veronese embedding of projective space and the projective embedding of Fano complete intersections in P^n.

Using the celebrated Witten-Kontsevich theorem, we prove a recursive formula of the n -point functions for intersection numbers on moduli spaces of curves. It has been used to prove the Faber intersection number conjecture and motivated us to find some conjectural vanishing identities for Gromov-Witten invariants. The latter has been proved recently by X. Liu and R. Pandharipande. We also give a combinatorial interpretation of n -point functions in terms of summation over binary trees.