Calabi-Yau Spaces in the String Landscape

We review recent work which has significantly sharpened our geometric understanding and interpretation of the moduli space of certain $N$=2 superconformal field theories. This has resolved some important issues in mirror symmetry and has also established that string theory admits physically smooth processes which can result in a change in topology of the spatial universe.

Supervised machine learning can be used to predict properties of string geometries with previously unknown features. Using the complete intersection Calabi-Yau (CICY) threefold dataset as a theoretical laboratory for this investigation, we use low $h^{1,1}$ geometries for training and validate on geometries with large $h^{1,1}$. Neural networks and Support Vector Machines successfully predict trends in the number of K\"ahler parameters of CICY threefolds. The numerical accura...

We describe an efficient, construction independent, algorithmic test to determine whether Calabi--Yau threefolds admit a structure compatible with the Large Volume moduli stabilization scenario of type IIB superstring theory. Using the algorithm, we scan complete intersection and toric hypersurface Calabi-Yau threefolds with $2 \leq h^{1,1} \le 4$ and deduce that 418 among 4434 manifolds have a Large Volume Limit with a single large four-cycle. We describe major extensions to...

We study Calabi-Yau threefolds with large Hodge numbers by constructing and counting triangulations of reflexive polytopes. By counting points in the associated secondary polytopes, we show that the number of fine, regular, star triangulations of polytopes in the Kreuzer-Skarke list is bounded above by $\binom{14,111}{494} \approx 10^{928}$. Adapting a result of Anclin on triangulations of lattice polygons, we obtain a bound on the number of triangulations of each 2-face of e...

We show that non-trivial SU(3) structures can be constructed on large classes of Calabi-Yau three-folds. Specifically, we focus on Calabi-Yau three-folds constructed as complete intersections in products of projective spaces, although we expect similar methods to apply to other constructions and also to Calabi-Yau four-folds. Among the wide range of possible SU(3) structures we find Strominger-Hull systems, suitable for heterotic or type II string compactifications, on all co...

We introduce neural networks to compute numerical Ricci-flat CY metrics for complete intersection and Kreuzer-Skarke Calabi-Yau manifolds at any point in K\"ahler and complex structure moduli space, and introduce the package cymetric which provides computation realizations of these techniques. In particular, we develop and computationally realize methods for point-sampling on these manifolds. The training for the neural networks is carried out subject to a custom loss functio...

We use the latest techniques in machine-learning to study whether from the landscape of Calabi-Yau manifolds one can distinguish elliptically fibred ones. Using the dataset of complete intersections in products of projective spaces (CICY3 and CICY4, totalling about a million manifolds) as a concrete playground, we find that a relatively simple neural network with forward-feeding multi-layers can very efficiently distinguish the elliptic fibrations, much more so than using the...

We construct all possible complete intersection Calabi-Yau five-folds in a product of four or less complex projective spaces, with up to four constraints. We obtain $27068$ spaces, which are not related by permutations of rows and columns of the configuration matrix, and determine the Euler number for all of them. Excluding the $3909$ product manifolds among those, we calculate the cohomological data for $12433$ cases, i.e. $53.7 \%$ of the non-product spaces, obtaining $2375...

Calabi-Yau manifolds have played a key role in both mathematics and physics, and are particularly important for deriving realistic models of particle physics from string theory. Unfortunately, very little is known about the explicit metrics on these spaces, leaving us unable, for example, to compute particle masses or couplings in these models. We review recent progress in this direction on using numerical approximations to compute the spectrum of the Laplacian on these space...

The study of the geometry of Calabi-Yau fourfolds is relevant for compactifications of string theory, M-theory, and F-theory to various dimensions. In the first part of this thesis, we study the action of mirror symmetry on two-dimensional $\cN=(2,2)$ effective theories obtained by compactifying Type IIA string theory on Calabi-Yau fourfolds. Our focus is on fourfold geometries with non-trivial three-form cohomology. The couplings of the massless zero-modes arising from an ex...