Calabi-Yau differential equations of degree 2 and 3 and Yifan Yang's pullback

The main part of this paper is a big table containing what we believe to be a complete list of all fourth order equations of Calabi--Yau type known so far. In the text preceding the tables we explain what a differential equation of Calabi--Yau type is and we briefly discuss how we found these equations. We also describe an electronic version of this list.

The very few 5-th order differential equations which have 4-th order Calabi-Yau equations as pullbacks are listed. We use the pullback of Yifan Yang that in most cases has much lower degree than the usual pullback.

We explain an experimental method to find CY-type differential equations of order $3$ related to modular functions of genus zero. We introduce a similar class of Calabi-Yau differential equations of order $5$, show several examples and make a conjecture related to some geometric invariants. We finish the paper with a few examples of seven order.

Various methods to find Calabi-Yau differential equations are discussed.

We investigate the structures of Calabi-Yau differential equations and the relations to the arithmetic of the pencils of Calabi-Yau varieties behind the equations. This provides explanations of some observations and computations in a recent paper by Samol and van Straten.

In this paper we introduce a new equation on the compact Kahler manifolds. Solution of this equation corresponds to the Calabi-Yau metric. New equation differs from the Monge--Ampere equation considered by Calabi and Yau.

We give an algebraic characterization of Picard-Fuchs operators attached to families of Calabi-Yau manifolds with a point of maximally unipotent monodromy and discuss possibilities for their differential Galois groups.

Motivated by the relationship of classical modular functions and Picard--Fuchs linear differential equations of order 2 and 3, we present an analogous concept for equations of order 4 and 5.

The zeta-function of a manifold is closely related to, and sometimes can be calculated completely, in terms of its periods. We report here on a practical and computationally rapid implementation of this procedure for families of Calabi-Yau manifolds with one complex structure parameter phi. Although partly conjectural, it turns out to be possible to compute the matrix of the Frobenius map on the third cohomology group of X(phi) directly from the Picard-Fuchs differential oper...

This paper contains a preliminary study of the monodromy of certain fourth order differential equations, that were called of Calabi-Yau type in math.NT/0402386. Some of these equations can be interpreted as the Picard-Fuchs equations of a Calabi-Yau manifold with one complex modulus, which links up the observed integrality to the conjectured integrality of the Gopakumar-Vafa invariants. A natural question is if in the other cases such a geometrical interpretation is also poss...