A note on BPS structures and Gopakumar–Vafa invariants

Abstract

We regard the work of Maulik and Toda, proposing a sheaf-theoretic approach to Gopakumar-Vafa invariants, as defining a BPS structure, that is, a collection of BPS invariants together with a central charge. Assuming their conjectures, we show that a canonical flat section of the flat connection corresponding to this BPS structure, at the level of formal power series, reproduces the Gromov-Witten partition function for all genera, up to some error terms in genus 0 and 1. This generalises a result of Bridgeland and Iwaki for the contribution from genus 0 Gopakumar-Vafa invariants.