Instantons, quivers and noncommutative Donaldson–Thomas theory Original Research Article

We construct noncommutative Donaldson–Thomas invariants associated with abelian orbifold singularities by analyzing the instanton contributions to a six-dimensional topological gauge theory. The noncommutative deformation of this gauge theory localizes on noncommutative instantons which can be classified in terms of three-dimensional Young diagrams with a colouring of boxes according to the orbifold group. We construct a moduli space for these gauge field configurations which allows us to compute its virtual numbers via the counting of representations of a quiver with relations. The quiver encodes the instanton dynamics of the noncommutative gauge theory, and is associated to the geometry of the singularity via the generalized McKay correspondence. The index of BPS states which compute the noncommutative Donaldson–Thomas invariants is realized via topological quantum mechanics based on the quiver data. We illustrate these constructions with several explicit examples, involving also higher rank Coulomb branch invariants and geometries with compact divisors, and connect our approach with other ones in the literature.