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Kevin H. Lin
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One reason is Givental's conjecture, which says that in the semisimple case, genus 0 GW invariants determine higher genus GW invariants. See this paper of Teleman, in which the conjecture is proved.

The theory of Frobenius manifolds in general is quite complicated. I guess semisimple Frobenius manifolds form a relatively tractable set of examples. Here are some basic references for the theory of semisimple Frobenius manifolds:

  • Manin: Frobenius manifolds, quantum cohomology, and moduli spaces

  • Dubrovin: Geometry of 2d topological field theories

  • Lee, Pandharipande: Frobenius manifolds, Gromov-Witten theory, and Virasoro constraints (so far unpublished and incomplete; available at Pandharipande's webpage)

Semisimple Frobenius manifolds also arise in singularity theory, when studying for instance isolated hypersurface singularities (see Hertling's book Frobenius manifolds and moduli spaces for singularities; the three references above probably also talk about this). I don't know whether Frobenius manifolds (in particular non-semisimple ones) arise more generally in singularity theory...? In any case, these Frobenius manifolds coming from singularity theory are supposed to be related to those coming from Gromov-Witten theory via mirror symmetry.

Another comment: Quantum cohomology of, for example, $\mathbb{P}^n$ is semisimple. Then perhaps this makes quantum cohomology and GW theory of projective varieties more tractable, because of quantum Lefschetz ... but I don't really know anything about this. But very roughly speaking, I think this is the strategy of Givental in his proof of the "mirror conjecture" of Candelas et. al. regarding the genus 0 GW theory of the quintic 3-fold, though I might be wrong.

Kevin H. Lin
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