TITLE: Are Donaldson-Thomas invariants "A-model" or "B-model" ?
QUESTION [26 upvotes]: Donaldson-Thomas invariants are the (virtual) Euler characteristics of moduli spaces of elements of the derived category of coherent sheaves (with some fixed Chern class, satisfying some stability condition, etc.) which bear some relation to "holomorphic Chern Simons theory", whatever that is. 


Should I think of these as "A-model" or "B-model" invariants?


On the one hand, DT invariants come from the bounded derived category of coherent sheaves, which is what features in the B-model.  On the other, there is the MNOP conjecture which tells me that the DT invariants of a CY 3-fold are ``the same'' as the Gromov-Witten invariants of the SAME 3-fold, which are A-model things.
As I understand it, according to Costello, if I take the cyclic A-infinity category built out of d-b-coh and run it through his machinery, I should get the topological string corresponding to the B-model.  But (modulo my confusion on the matter) according to Kontsevich and Soibelman, if I take the cyclic A-infinity category built out of d-b-coh and run it through their machinery, I should get DT invariants.  So what is going on?

REPLY [20 votes]: Ha, I think I'm going to disagree.
DT invariants are (more-or-less) independent of the complex structure on the CY: they are invariant under deformations of the CY.
However they depend on the (stringy/complexified) Kähler structure, or stability condition, or whatever. Hence wall crossing etc.
So even though they appear to be defined using D(coh), they're rather insensitive to that. What they are sensitive to is the small piece of data that's often forgotten -- a stability condition. So really one should think of them as defined in terms of a point in the space of stability conditions, or the stringy Kähler moduli space.
Ideally they'd be invariants of only the symplectic structure, just like GW invariants, but until MNOP is proved in full generality that's not known even in the projective case.
This makes them sound like "A-model invariants" to me, but then I'm not very sure about the physics language.