Quivers with potentials and their representations I: Mutations

We study quivers with relations given by non-commutative analogs of Jacobian ideals in the complete path algebra. This framework allows us to give a representation-theoretic interpretation of quiver mutations at arbitrary vertices. This gives a far-reaching generalization of Bernstein-Gelfand-Ponomarev reflection functors. The motivations for this work come from several sources: superpotentials in physics, Calabi-Yau algebras, cluster algebras.