Balanced Topological Field Theories

We describe a class of topological field theories called “balanced topological field theories”. These theories are associated to moduli problems with vanishing virtual dimension and calculate the Euler character of various moduli spaces. We show that these theories are closely related to the geometry and equivariant cohomology of “iterated superspaces” that carry two differentials. We find the most general action for these theories, which turns out to define Morse theory on field space. We illustrate the constructions with numerous examples. Finally, we relate these theories to topological sigma-models twisted using an isometry of the target space. Received: 2 September 1996 / Accepted: 3 October 1996