Generalized Donaldson-Thomas invariants

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This is a survey of the book arXiv:0810.5645 with Yinan Song. Let X be a Calabi-Yau 3-fold over C. The Donaldson-Thomas invariants of X are integers DTᵃ(t) which count stable sheaves with Chern character a on X, with respect to a Gieseker stability condition t. They are defined only for Chern characters a for which there are no strictly semistable sheaves on X. They have the good property that they are unchanged under deformations of X. Their behaviour under change of stability condition t was not understood until now. We discuss "generalized Donaldson-Thomas invariants" DTᵃ(t). These are rational numbers, defined for all Chern characters a, and are equal to DTᵃ(t) if there are no strictly semistable sheaves in class a. They are deformation-invariant, and have a known transformation law under change of stability condition. We conjecture they can be written in terms of integral "BPS invariants" DTᵃ(t) when the stability condition t is "generic". We extend the theory to abelian categories of representations of a quiver with relations coming from a superpotential, and connect our ideas with Szendroi's "noncommutative Donaldson-Thomas invariants" and work by Reineke and others. There is significant overlap between arXiv:0810.5645 and the independent paper arXiv:0811.2435 by Kontsevich and Soibelman.