Instanton effects and quantum spectral curves

Abstract

We study a spectral problem associated to the quantization of a spectral curve arising in local mirror symmetry. The perturbative WKB quantization condition is determined by the quantum periods, or equivalently by the refined topological string in the Nekrasov-Shatashvili (NS) limit. We show that the information encoded in the quantum periods is radically insufficient to determine the spectrum: there is an infinite series of instanton corrections, which are non-perturbative in \hbar, and lead to an exact WKB quantization condition. Moreover, we conjecture the precise form of the instanton corrections: they are determined by the standard or un-refined topological string free energy, and we test our conjecture successfully against numerical calculations of the spectrum. This suggests that the non-perturbative sector of the NS refined topological string contains information about the standard topological string. As an application of the WKB quantization condition, we explain some recent observations relating membrane instanton corrections in ABJM theory to the refined topological string.