Primary invariants of Hurwitz Frobenius manifolds

Hurwitz spaces parameterizing covers of the Riemann sphere can be equipped with a Frobenius structure. In this review, we recall the con- struction of such Hurwitz Frobenius manifolds as well as the correspondence between semisimple Frobenius manifolds and the topological recursion formal- ism. We then apply this correspondence to Hurwitz Frobenius manifolds by explaining that the corresponding primary invariants can be obtained as pe- riods of multidifferentials globally defined on a compact Riemann surface by topological recursion. Finally, we use this construction to reply to the follow- ing question in a large class of cases: given a compact Riemann surface, what does the topological recursion compute? Contents 1. Introduction 2. Frobenius manifolds 3. Topological recursion and cohomological field theory 4. Hurwitz Frobenius manifolds 5. Topological recursion for compact spectral curves 6. Topological recursion for families of spectral curves References 1. Introduction Consider a diagonal flat metric on a complex...

About the book:
This volume contains the proceedings of the 2016 AMS von Neumann Symposium on Topological Recursion and its Influence in Analysis, Geometry, and Topology, which was held from July 4–8, 2016, at the Hilton Charlotte University Place, Charlotte, North Carolina.

Topological recursion has played a fundamental role in connecting seemingly unrelated areas of mathematics such as matrix models, enumeration of Hurwitz numbers and Grothendieck's dessins d'enfants, Gromov-Witten invariants, the A-polynomials and colored polynomial invariants of knots, WKB analysis, and quantization of Hitchin moduli spaces. In addition to establishing these topics, the volume includes survey papers on the most recent key accomplishments: discovery of the unexpected relation to semi-simple cohomological field theories and a solution to the remodeling conjecture. It also provides a glimpse into the future research direction; for example, connections with the Airy structures, modular functors, Hurwitz-Frobenius manifolds, and ELSV-type formulas.