Calabi-Yau Varieties: from Quiver Representations to Dessins d'Enfants

This paper presents the current status on modularity of Calabi-Yau varieties since the last update in 2003. We will focus on Calabi-Yau varieties of dimension at most three. Here modularity refers to at least two different types: arithmetic modularity and geometric modularity. These will include: (1) the modularity (automorphy) of Galois representations of Calabi-Yau varieties (or motives) defined over Q or number fields, (2) the modularity of solutions of Picard--Fuchs diffe...

With a bird's-eye view, we survey the landscape of Calabi-Yau threefolds, compact and non-compact, smooth and singular. Emphasis will be placed on the algorithms and databases which have been established over the years, and how they have been useful in the interaction between the physics and the mathematics, especially in string and gauge theories. A skein which runs through this review will be algorithmic and computational algebraic geometry and how, implementing its princip...

The geometric aspects of mirror symmetry are reviewed, with an eye towards future developments. Given a mirror pair (X,Y) of Calabi-Yau threefolds, the best-understood mirror statements relate certain small corners of the moduli spaces of X and of Y. We will indicate how one might go beyond such statements, and relate the moduli spaces more globally. In fact, in the boldest version of mirror symmetry (the Strominger-Yau-Zaslow conjecture), the Calabi-Yau threefolds X and Y sh...

We carry out the SYZ program for the local Calabi--Yau manifolds of type $\widetilde{A}$ by developing an equivariant SYZ theory for the toric Calabi--Yau manifolds of infinite-type. Mirror geometry is shown to be expressed in terms of the Riemann theta functions and generating functions of open Gromov--Witten invariants, whose modular properties are found and studied in this article. Our work also provides a mathematical justification for a mirror symmetry assertion of the p...

In these lecture notes, we survey the landscape of Calabi-Yau threefolds, and the use of machine learning to explore it. We begin with the compact portion of the landscape, focusing in particular on complete intersection Calabi-Yau varieties (CICYs) and elliptic fibrations. Non-compact Calabi-Yau manifolds are manifest in Type II superstring theories, they arise as representation varieties of quivers, used to describe gauge theories in the bulk familiar four dimensions. Final...

This proceedings note introduces aspects of the authors' work relating mirror symmetry and integral variations of Hodge structure. The emphasis is on their classification of the integral variations of Hodge structure which can underly families of Calabi-Yau threefolds over the thrice-punctured sphere with b^3 = 4, or equivalently h^{2,1} = 1, and the related issues of geometric realization of these variations. The presentation parallels that of the first author's talk at the ...

Bipartite graphs, especially drawn on Riemann surfaces, have of late assumed an active role in theoretical physics, ranging from MHV scattering amplitudes to brane tilings, from dimer models and topological strings to toric AdS/CFT, from matrix models to dessins d'enfants in gauge theory. Here, we take a brief and casual promenade in the realm of brane tilings, quiver SUSY gauge theories and dessins, serving as a rapid introduction to the reader.

We give a mathematical account of a recent string theory calculation which predicts the number of rational curves on the generic quintic threefold. Our account involves the interpretation of Yukawa couplings in terms of variations of Hodge structure, a new $q$-expansion principle for functions on the moduli space of Calabi-Yau manifolds, and the ``mirror symmetry'' phenomenon recently observed by string theorists.

This is the author's Habilitation which took place at University of Essen on July 11, 1993. The manuscript contains two parts. The first one is devoted to the author's combinatorial construction of mirrors of Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces in Gorenstein toric Fano varieties. The second one contains author's results on the variation of mixed Hodge structures of affine hypersurfaces in algebraic tori and their connection to Gelfand-Kapranov-Zelevinsky theory of generalized hypergeome...

These lectures are devoted to introducing some of the basic features of quantum geometry that have been emerging from compactified string theory over the last couple of years. The developments discussed include new geometric features of string theory which occur even at the classical level as well as those which require non-perturbative effects. These lecture notes are based on an evolving set of lectures presented at a number of schools but most closely follow a series of se...