Crystal melting on toric surfaces

Abstract We study the relationship between the statistical mechanics of crystal melting and instanton counting in N = 4 supersymmetric U ( 1 ) gauge theory on toric surfaces. We argue that, in contrast to their six-dimensional cousins, the two problems are related but not identical. We develop a vertex formalism for the crystal partition function, which calculates a generating function for the dimension 0 and 1 subschemes of the toric surface, and describe the modifications required to obtain the corresponding gauge theory partition function.