The Dijkgraaf-Vafa prepotential in the context of general Seiberg-Witten theory

We consider the prepotential of Dijkgraaf and Vafa (DV) as one more (and in fact, singular) example of the Seiberg-Witten (SW) prepotentials and discuss its properties from this perspective. Most attention is devoted to the issue of complete system of moduli, which should include not only the sizes of the cuts (in matrix model interpretation), but also their positions, i.e., the number of moduli should be almost doubled, as compared to the DV consideration. We introduce the notion of regularized DV system (not necessarily related to matrix model) and discuss the WDVV equations. These definitely hold before regularization is lifted, but an adequate limiting procedure, preserving all ingredients of the SW theory, remains to be found. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V All rights reserved.