Cohomological localization of Chern-Simons theory

Abstract

We generalize the framework introduced by Kapustin et al. for doing path integral localization in Chern-Simons theory to work on any Seifert manifold. This is done by topologically twisting the supersymmetric theory considered by Kapustin et al., after which the theory takes a cohomological form. We also consider Wilson loops which wrap the fiber directions and compute their expectation values. We discuss the relation with other approaches to exact path integral calculations in Chern-Simons theory.