Changzheng Li, Konstanze Rietsch, Mingzhi Yang
We initiate a `Peterson program' that seeks to extend Dale Peterson's theory for the quantum cohomology of flag varieties to arbitrary Schubert varieties, and that incorporates a mirror-symmetric approach. In this first paper we introduce a generalisation of the (localised) Peterson variety associated to an arbitrary Schubert variety $\check X_{w,P}$ inside a partial flag variety $\check G/\check P$. This generalisation is possibly a non-reduced affine scheme that lies in the Langlands dual full flag variety $G/B$. Additionally, we construct a Lie-theoretic `superpotential' associated to $\check X_{w,P}$, generalising earlier ones for the flag varieties $\check G/\check P$ from [Rie08], and we show that its relative critical point locus recovers the generalised Peterson variety. We make the key conjecture that for smooth Fano Schubert varieties the coordinate ring of the generalised Peterson variety recovers the quantum cohomology ring of $\check X_{w,P}$ localised at the quantum parameters. For smooth Fano Schubert varieties $X_{w,B}$ in $\check G/\check B$ we furthermore map our generalised Peterson variety to the cotangent bundle $\mathcal T^*(T)$ of the maximal torus $T$ of $G$ and construct a partial compactification that we conjecture models the full quantum cohomology ring of $\check X_{w,B}$, in analogy with the Givental-Kim presentation of $QH^*(\check G/\check B)$ via the degenerate leaf of the Kostant Toda lattice of $\check G$. These conjectures are verified for all smooth Schubert divisors in the complete type $A$ flag variety, and we show that our superpotential agrees with that introduced for Grassmannian Schubert varieties by Rietsch and Williams, after a suitable isomorphism of the domains.