What do bounding chains look like, and why are they related to linking numbers?

Gromov-Witten invariants count pseudo-holomorphic curves on a symplectic manifold passing through some fixed points and submanifolds. Similarly, open Gromov-Witten invariants are supposed to count disks with boundary on a Lagrangian, but in most cases such counts are not independent of some choices as we would wish. Motivated by Fukaya’11, J. Solomon and S. Tukachinsky constructed open Gromov-Witten invariants in their 2016 papers from an algebraic perspective of $A_{\infty}$-algebras of differential forms, utilizing the idea of bounding chains in Fukaya-Oh-Ohta-Ono’06. On the other hand, Welschinger defined open invariants on sixfolds in 2012 that count multi-disks weighted by the linking numbers between their boundaries. We present a geometric translation of Solomon-Tukachinsky’s construction. From this geometric perspective, their invariants readily reduce to Welschinger’s.

https://harvard.zoom.us/j/98781914555?pwd=bmVzZGdlRThyUDREMExab20ybmg1Zz09