Highest Weight Vectors, Shifted Topological Recursion and Quantum Curves

Abstract We extend the theory of topological recursion by considering Airy ideals (also known as Airy structures) whose partition functions are highest weight vectors of particular $$\mathcal {W}$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>W</mml:mi> </mml:math> -algebra representations. Such highest weight vectors arise as partition functions of Airy ideals only under certain conditions on the representations. In the spectral curve formulation of topological recursion, we show that this generalization amounts to adding specific terms to the correlators $$ \omega _{g,1}$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>ω</mml:mi> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>g</mml:mi> <mml:mo>,</mml:mo> <mml:mn>1</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:msub> </mml:math> , which leads to a “shifted topological recursion” formula. We then prove that the wave-functions constructed from this shifted version of topological recursion are WKB solutions of families of quantizations of the spectral curve with $$ \hslash $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>ℏ</mml:mi> </mml:math> -dependent terms. In the reverse direction, starting from an $$\hslash $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>ℏ</mml:mi> </mml:math> -connection, we find that it is of topological type if the exact same conditions that we found for the Airy ideals are satisfied. When this happens, the resulting shifted loop equations can be solved by the shifted topological recursion obtained earlier.