In our previous paper we suggested a conjecture relating the structure of the small quantum cohomology ring of a smooth Fano variety of Picard number 1 to the structure of its derived category of coherent sheaves. Here we generalize this conjecture, make it more precise, and support it by the examples of (co)adjoint homogeneous varieties of simple algebraic groups of Dynkin types $\mathrm {A}_n$ and $\mathrm {D}_n$, that is, flag varieties $\operatorname {Fl}(1,n;n+1)$ and isotropic orthogonal Grassmannians $\operatorname {OG}(2,2n)$; in particular, we construct on each of those an exceptional collection invariant with respect to the entire automorphism group. For $\operatorname {OG}(2,2n)$ this is the first exceptional collection proved to be full.

We prove a Givental-style mirror theorem for toric Deligne–Mumford stacks ${\mathcal{X}}$. This determines the genus-zero Gromov–Witten invariants of ${\mathcal{X}}$ in terms of an explicit hypergeometric function, called the $I$-function, that takes values in the Chen–Ruan orbifold cohomology of ${\mathcal{X}}$.

We explicitly calculate some Gromov–Witten correspondences determined by maps of labelled curves of genus 0 to the moduli spaces of labelled curves of genus 0. We consider these calculations as the first step towards studying the self-referential nature of motivic quantum cohomology.

While the intersection of the Grassmannian Bruhat decompositions for all coordinate flags is an intractable mess, it turns out that the intersection of only the cyclic shifts of one Bruhat decomposition has many of the good properties of the Bruhat and Richardson decompositions. This decomposition coincides with the projection of the Richardson stratification of the flag manifold, studied by Lusztig, Rietsch, Brown–Goodearl–Yakimov and the present authors. However, its cyclic-invariance is hidden in this description. Postnikov gave many cyclic-invariant ways to index the strata, and we give a new one, by a subset of the affine Weyl group we call bounded juggling patterns. We call the strata positroid varieties. Applying results from [A. Knutson, T. Lam and D. Speyer, Projections of Richardson varieties, J. Reine Angew. Math., to appear, arXiv:1008.3939 [math.AG]], we show that positroid varieties are normal, Cohen–Macaulay, have rational singularities, and are defined as schemes by the vanishing of Plücker coordinates. We prove that their associated cohomology classes are represented by affine Stanley functions. This latter fact lets us connect Postnikov’s and Buch–Kresch–Tamvakis’ approaches to quantum Schubert calculus.

We prove that the quantum cohomology ring of any minuscule or cominuscule homogeneous space, specialized at $q\,=\,1$, is semisimple. This implies that complex conjugation defines an algebra automorphism of the quantum cohomology ring localized at the quantum parameter. We check that this involution coincides with the strange duality defined in our previous article. We deduce Vafa–Intriligator type formulas for the Gromov–Witten invariants.

Let V be a vector space with a non-degenerate symmetric form and OG be the orthogonal Grassmannian which parametrizes maximal isotropic subspaces in V. We give a presentation for the (small) quantum cohomology ring QH*(OG) and show that its product structure is determined by the ring of $\widetilde{P}$-polynomials. A ‘quantum Schubert calculus’ is formulated, which includes quantum Pieri and Giambelli formulas, as well as algorithms for computing Gromov--Witten invariants. As an application, we show that the table of three-point, genus zero Gromov–Witten invariants for OG coincides with that for a corresponding Lagrangian Grassmannian LG, up to an involution.

Let X be a smooth projective variety. Using modified psi classes on the stack of genus-zero stable maps to X, a new associative quantum product is constructed on the cohomology space of X. When X is a homogeneous variety, this structure encodes the characteristic numbers of rational curves in X, and specialises to the usual quantum product upon resetting the parameters corresponding to the modified psi classes. For $X=\mathbb{P}^2$, the product is equivalent to that of the contact cohomology of Ernström and Kennedy.

We give elementary proofs of the main theorems about the (small) quantum cohomology of Grassmannians, including the quantum Giambelli and quantum Pieri formulas, the rim-hook algorithm, the presentation, and a recent theorem of Fulton and Woodward about the minimal q-power which appears in a product of two Schubert classes.

We formulate a generalization of Givental–Kim's quantum hyperplane principle. This is applied to compute the quantum cohomology of a Calabi–Yau 3-fold defined as the rank 4 locus of a general skew-symmetric 7×7 matrix with coefficients in P6. The computation verifies the mirror symmetry predictions of Rødland [25].