BPS states, Donaldson-Thomas invariants and the Hitchin
system -- Emanuel Diaconescu, November 11, 2011

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This talk will report on joint work with Wu-yen Chuang and
Guang Pan relating the cohomology of the Hitchin system to
Donaldson-Thomas theory and BPS inavariants of Calabi-Yau
threefolds. A string-theoretic construction will be presented
which relates refined curve-counting invariants to the work of
Hausel and Rodriguez-Villegas on character varieties.