CRITICAL VIRTUAL MANIFOLDS AND PERVERSE SHEAVES

In Donaldson-Thomas theory, moduli spaces are locally the critical locus of a holomorphic function defined on a complex manifold. In this paper, we develop a theory of critical virtual manifolds which are the gluing of critical loci of holomorphic functions. We show that a critical virtual manifold X admits a natural semi-perfect obstruction theory and a virtual fundamental class $[X]^{vir}$ whose degree $DT(X)=deg[X]^{vir}$ is the Euler characteristic ${\chi}_{\nu}$(X) weighted by the Behrend function ${\nu}$. We prove that when the critical virtual manifold is orientable, the local perverse sheaves of vanishing cycles glue to a perverse sheaf P whose hypercohomology has Euler characteristic equal to the Donaldson-Thomas type invariant DT(X). In the companion paper, we proved that a moduli space X of simple sheaves on a Calabi-Yau 3-fold Y is a critical virtual manifold whose perverse sheaf categorifies the Donaldson-Thomas invariant of Y and also gives us a mathematical theory of Gopakumar-Vafa invariants.