Lectures on complex geometry, Calabi-Yau manifolds and toric geometry

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...

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...

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...

This paper gives a leisurely introduction to Calabi-Yau manifolds and special Lagrangian submanifolds from the differential geometric point of view, followed by a survey of recent results on singularities of special Lagrangian submanifolds, and their application to the SYZ Conjecture. It is aimed at graduate students in Geometry, String Theorists, and others wishing to learn the subject, and is designed to be fairly self-contained. It is based on lecture courses given at No...

In this paper we summarize our recent work in the construction of Lagrangian torus fibrations for Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces in toric varieties and the symplectic Strominger-Yau-Zaslow conjecture, together with some new development. It is submittded to the Proceedings of the Conference in Symplectic Geometry and Mirror Symmetry held in KIAS, Seoul, Korea. The paper was finished in Jan. 2001, with revisions and added reference.

In this paper, we make progress on understanding the collapsing behavior of Calabi-Yau metrics on a degenerating family of polarized Calabi-Yau manifolds. In the case of a family of smooth Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces in projective space degenerating into the transversal union of two smooth Fano hypersurfaces in a generic way, we obtain a complete result in all dimensions establishing explicit and precise relationships between the metric collapsing and complex structure degenerat...

We compute the integral homology (including torsion), the topological K-theory, and the Hodge structure on cohomology of Calabi-Yau threefold hypersurfaces and complete intersections in Gorenstein toric Fano varieties. The methods are purely topological.

In this paper we start the program of constructing generalized special Lagrangian torus fibrations for Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces in toric variety near the large complex limit, with respect to the restriction of a toric metric on the toric variety to the Calabi-Yau hypersurface. The construction is based on the deformation of the standard toric generalized special Lagrangian torus fibration of the large complex limit $X_0$. In this paper, we will deal with the region near the s...

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...

To pave the way for the journey from geometry to conformal field theory (CFT), these notes present the background for some basic CFT constructions from Calabi-Yau geometry. Topics include the complex and Kaehler geometry of Calabi-Yau manifolds and their classification in low dimensions. I furthermore discuss CFT constructions for the simplest known examples that are based in Calabi-Yau geometry, namely for the toroidal superconformal field theories and their Z2-orbifolds. ...