Calabi-Yau Volumes and Reflexive Polytopes

Reflexive polyhedra encode the combinatorial data for mirror pairs of Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces in toric varieties. We investigate the geometrical structures of circumscribed polytopes with a minimal number of facets and of inscribed polytopes with a minimal number of vertices. These objects, which constrain reflexive pairs of polyhedra from the interior and the exterior, can be described in terms of certain non-negative integral matrices. A major tool in the classification of...

Kreuzer and Skarke famously produced the largest known database of Calabi-Yau threefolds by providing a complete construction of all 473,800,776 reflexive polyhedra that exist in four dimensions. These polyhedra describe the singular limits of ambient toric varieties in which Calabi-Yau threefolds can exist as hypersurfaces. In this paper, we review how to extract topological and geometric information about Calabi-Yau threefolds using the toric construction, and we provide, i...

During the last years we have generated a large number of data related to Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces in toric varieties which can be described by reflexive polyhedra. We classified all reflexive polyhedra in three dimensions leading to K3 hypersurfaces and have nearly completed the four dimensional case relevant to Calabi-Yau threefolds. In addition, we have analysed for many of the resulting spaces whether they allow fibration structures of the types that are relevant in the c...

Four dimensional reflexive polyhedra encode the data for smooth Calabi-Yau threefolds that are hypersurfaces in toric varieties, and have important applications both in perturbative and in non-perturbative string theory. We describe how we obtained all 473,800,776 reflexive polyhedra that exist in four dimensions and the 30,108 distinct pairs of Hodge numbers of the resulting Calabi-Yau manifolds. As a by-product we show that all these spaces (and hence the corresponding stri...

Calabi-Yau manifolds can be obtained as hypersurfaces in toric varieties built from reflexive polytopes. We generate reflexive polytopes in various dimensions using a genetic algorithm. As a proof of principle, we demonstrate that our algorithm reproduces the full set of reflexive polytopes in two and three dimensions, and in four dimensions with a small number of vertices and points. Motivated by this result, we construct five-dimensional reflexive polytopes with the lowest ...

Reflexive polygons have been extensively studied in a variety of contexts in mathematics and physics. We generalize this programme by looking at the 45 different lattice polygons with two interior points up to SL(2,$\mathbb{Z}$) equivalence. Each corresponds to some affine toric 3-fold as a cone over a Sasaki-Einstein 5-fold. We study the quiver gauge theories of D3-branes probing these cones, which coincide with the mesonic moduli space. The minimum of the volume function of...

We show that the Reeb vector, and hence in particular the volume, of a Sasaki-Einstein metric on the base of a toric Calabi-Yau cone of complex dimension n may be computed by minimising a function Z on R^n which depends only on the toric data that defines the singularity. In this way one can extract certain geometric information for a toric Sasaki-Einstein manifold without finding the metric explicitly. For complex dimension n=3 the Reeb vector and the volume correspond to th...

We present a collection of explicit formulas for the minimum volume of Sasaki-Einstein 5-manifolds. The cone over these 5-manifolds is a toric Calabi-Yau 3-fold. These toric Calabi-Yau 3-folds are associated with an infinite class of 4d N=1 supersymmetric gauge theories, which are realized as worldvolume theories of D3-branes probing the toric Calabi-Yau 3-folds. Under the AdS/CFT correspondence, the minimum volume of the Sasaki-Einstein base is inversely proportional to the ...

Two of my collaborations with Max Kreuzer involved classification problems related to string vacua. In 1992 we found all 10,839 classes of polynomials that lead to Landau-Ginzburg models with c=9 (Klemm and Schimmrigk also did this); 7,555 of them are related to Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces. Later we found all 473,800,776 reflexive polytopes in four dimensions; these give rise to Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces in toric varieties. The missing piece - toric constructions that need not be...

We find through a systematic analysis that all but 29,223 of the 473.8 million 4D reflexive polytopes found by Kreuzer and Skarke have a 2D reflexive subpolytope. Such a subpolytope is generally associated with the presence of an elliptic or genus one fibration in the corresponding birational equivalence class of Calabi-Yau threefolds. This extends the growing body of evidence that most Calabi-Yau threefolds have an elliptically fibered phase.