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Virtual neighborhood technique for pseudo-holomorphic spheres

This is the first part of a trilogy where we apply the theory of virtual manifold/orbifolds developed by the first named author and Tian to study the Gromov-Witten moduli spaces. In this paper, we resolve the main analytic issue arising from the lack of differentiability of $PSL(2, \C)$-action on spaces of $W^{1, p}$-maps from the Riemann sphere to a symplectic manifold $(X, ω, J)$ with a non-zero homology class $A$. In particular, we establish the slice and tubular neighbourhood theorems for $PSL(2, \C)$-action along smooth maps, and construct a $PSL(2, \C)$-obstruction bundle along $PSL(2, \C)$-orbit of a pseudo-holomorphic map representing a point in the moduli space $\cM_{0, 0}(X, A)$. In Sections 2 and 3 of this paper, we explain an integration theory on virtual orbifolds using proper étale groupoids and establish the virtual neighborhood technique for a general orbifold Fredholm system. When the moduli space $\cM_{0, 0}(X, A)$ of pseudo-holomorphic spheres in $(X, ω, J)$ is compact, applying the virtual neighborhood technique developed in Section 3, we obtain a virtual system for the moduli space $\cM_{0, 0}(X, A)$ of pseudo-holomorphic spheres in $(X, ω, J)$ and show that the genus zero Gromov-Witten invariant is well-defined.