Abstract. We develop a theory of reduced Gromov-Witten and stable pair invariants of surfaces and their canonical bundles.We show that classical Severi degrees are special cases of these invariants. This proves a special case of the MNOP conjecture, and allows us to generalise the Göttsche conjecture to the non-ample case. In a sequel we prove this generalisation.We prove a remarkable property of the moduli space of stable pairs on a surface. It is the zero locus of a section of a bundle on a smooth compact ambient space, making calculation with the reduced virtual cycle possible.
IntroductionMotivation. Fix a nonsingular projective surface S and a homology class β ∈ H 2 (S, Z). There are various ways of counting holomorphic curves in S in class β; in this paper we focus on Gromov-Witten invariants [Beh, LT] and stable pairs [PT1,Ott]. Since these are deformation invariant they must vanish in class β if there exists a deformation of S for which the Hodge type of β is not (1, 1). We can see the origin of this vanishing without deforming S as follows. For simplicity work in the simplest case of an embedded curve C ⊂ S with normal bundle N C = O C (C). As a Cartier divisor, C is the zero locus of a section s C of a line bundle L := O S (C), giving the exact sequenceThe resulting long exact sequence describes the relationship between first order deformations and obstructions H 0 (N C ), H 1 (N C ) of C ⊂ S, and the deformations and obstructionsThe resulting "semi-regularity map"S) takes obstructions to deforming C to the "cohomological part" of these obstructions. Roughly speaking, if we deform S, we get an associated obstruction in H 1 (N C ) to deforming C with it; its image in H 0,2 (S) is the (0, 2)-part of the cohomology class β ∈ H 2 (S) in the deformed complex structure. Thus it gives the obvious cohomological obstruction to deforming C: that β must remain of type (1, 1) in the deformed complex structure on S.In particular, when S is fixed, obstructions lie in the kernel ofMore generally, if we only consider deformations of S for which β remains (1, 1) then the same is true. And when h 0,2 (S) > 0 but H 2 (L) = 0, the existence of this trivial H 0,2 (S) piece of the obstruction sheaf guarantees that the virtual class vanishes.So it would be nice to restrict attention to surfaces and classes (S, β) inside the Noether-Lefschetz locus, 1 defining a new obstruction theory using only the kernel of the semi-regularity map.2 Checking that this kernel really defines an obstruction theory in the generality needed to define a virtual cycle -i.e. for deformations to all orders, over an arbitrary base, of possibly non-embedded 1 The locus of surfaces S for which β ∈ H 2 (S) has type (1, 1); for more details see [Voi, MP].
2For embedded curves this means we use the obstruction space H 1 (L) to deforming sections of L. We have been able to remove the obstructions H 2 (O S ) to deforming L since the space of line bundles is smooth over the Noether-Lefschetz locus. Here we give quite a general construction using a mixture ...