Changing the preferred direction of the refined topological vertex

Abstract

We consider the issue of the slice invariance of refined topological string amplitudes, which means that they are independent of the choice of the preferred direction of the refined topological vertex. We work out two examples. The first example is a geometric engineering of five-dimensional U(1) gauge theory with adjoint matter. The slice invariance follows from a highly non-trivial combinatorial identity which equates two known ways of computing the χy genus of the Hilbert scheme of points on C2. The second example is concerned with the proposal that the superpolynomials of the colored Hopf link are obtained from a refinement of topological open string amplitudes. We provide a closed formula for the superpolynomial, which confirms the slice invariance when the Hopf link is colored with totally anti-symmetric representations. However, we observe a breakdown of the slice invariance for other representations.