Descendents for stable pairs on 3-folds

Abstract

We survey here the construction and the basic properties of descendent invariants in the theory of stable pairs on nonsingular projective 3-folds. The main topics covered are the rationality of the generating series, the functional equation, the Gromov-Witten/Pairs correspondence for descendents, the Virasoro constraints, and the connection to the virtual fundamental class of the stable pairs moduli space in algebraic cobordism. In all of these directions, the proven results constitute only a small part of the conjectural framework. A central goal of the article is to introduce the open questions as simply and directly as possible.