Lectures on the Topological Vertex

In this lectures, I will summarize the approach to Gromov–Witten invariants on toric Calabi–Yau threefolds based on large N dualities. Since the large N duality/topological vertex approach computes Gromov–Witten invariants in terms of Chern–Simons knot and link invariants, Sect. 2 is devoted to a review of these. Section 3 reviews topological strings and Gromov–Witten invariants, and gives some information about the open string case. Section 4 introduces the class of geometries we will deal with, namely toric (noncompact) Calabi–Yau manifolds, and we present a useful graphical way to represent these manifolds which constitutes the geometric core of the theory of the topological vertex. Finally, in Sect. 5, we define the vertex and present some explicit formulae for it and some simple applications. A brief Appendix contains useful information about symmetric polynomials. It has not been possible to present all the relevant background and physical derivations in this set of lectures. However, these topics have been extensively reviewed for example in the book Mariño (2005), to which we refer for further information and/or references.