Heterotic Gauge Structure of Type II K3 Fibrations

We show that certain classes of K3 fibered Calabi-Yau manifolds derive from orbifolds of global products of K3 surfaces and particular types of curves. This observation explains why the gauge groups of the heterotic duals are determined by the structure of a single K3 surface and provides the dual heterotic picture of conifold transitions between K3 fibrations. Abstracting our construction from the special case of K3 hypersurfaces to general K3 manifolds with an appropriate automorphism, we show how to construct Calabi-Yau threefold duals for heterotic theories with arbitrary gauge groups. This generalization reveals that the previous limit on the Euler number of Calabi-Yau manifolds is an artifact of the restriction to the framework of hypersurfaces.Comment: 15 pages, 3 eps figure

Harmonic maps in unfashionable geometries

We describe some general constructions on a real smooth projective 4-quadric which provide analogues of the Willmore functional and conformal Gauss map in both Lie sphere and projective differential geometry. Extrema of these functionals are characterized by harmonicity of this Gauss map.Comment: plain TeX, uses bbmsl for blackboard bold, 20 page

Modular invariance in the gapped XYZ spin 1/2 chain

We show that the elliptic parametrization of the coupling constants of the quantum XYZ spin chain can be analytically extended outside of their natural domain, to cover the whole phase diagram of the model, which is composed of 12 adjacent regions, related to one another by a spin rotation. This extension is based on the modular properties of the elliptic functions and we show how rotations in parameter space correspond to the double covering PGL(2,Z)of the modular group, implying that the partition function of the XYZ chain is invariant under this group in parameter space, in the same way as a Conformal Field Theory partition function is invariant under the modular group acting in real space. The encoding of the symmetries of the model into the modular properties of the partition function could shed light on the general structure of integrable models.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures, 1 table. Accepted published versio

Flux compactification on smooth, compact three-dimensional toric varieties

Three-dimensional smooth, compact toric varieties (SCTV), when viewed as real six-dimensional manifolds, can admit G-structures rendering them suitable for internal manifolds in supersymmetric flux compactifications. We develop techniques which allow us to systematically construct G-structures on SCTV and read off their torsion classes. We illustrate our methods with explicit examples, one of which consists of an infinite class of toric CP^1 bundles. We give a self-contained review of the relevant concepts from toric geometry, in particular the subject of the classification of SCTV in dimensions less or equal to 3. Our results open up the possibility for a systematic construction and study of supersymmetric flux vacua based on SCTV.Comment: 27 pages, 10 figures; v2: references, minor typos & improvement

Parsing a sequence of qubits

We develop a theoretical framework for frame synchronization, also known as block synchronization, in the quantum domain which makes it possible to attach classical and quantum metadata to quantum information over a noisy channel even when the information source and sink are frame-wise asynchronous. This eliminates the need of frame synchronization at the hardware level and allows for parsing qubit sequences during quantum information processing. Our framework exploits binary constant-weight codes that are self-synchronizing. Possible applications may include asynchronous quantum communication such as a self-synchronizing quantum network where one can hop into the channel at any time, catch the next coming quantum information with a label indicating the sender, and reply by routing her quantum information with control qubits for quantum switches all without assuming prior frame synchronization between users.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures, 1 table. Final accepted version for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theor