On the Rim Tori Refinement of Relative Gromov-Witten Invariants

We construct Ionel-Parker's proposed refinement of the standard relative Gromov-Witten invariants in terms of abelian covers of the symplectic divisor and discuss in what sense it gives rise to invariants. We use it to obtain some vanishing results for the standard relative Gromov-Witten invariants. In a separate paper, we describe to what extent this refinement sharpens the usual symplectic sum formula and give further qualitative applications.