An Abundance of K3 Fibrations from Polyhedra with Interchangeable Parts

Even a cursory inspection of the Hodge plot associated with Calabi-Yau threefolds that are hypersurfaces in toric varieties reveals striking structures. These patterns correspond to webs of elliptic-K3 fibrations whose mirror images are also elliptic-K3 fibrations. Such manifolds arise from reflexive polytopes that can be cut into two parts along slices corresponding to the K3 fibers. Any two half-polytopes over a given slice can be combined into a reflexive polytope. This fact, together with a remarkable relation on the additivity of Hodge numbers, explains much of the structure of the observed patterns.Comment: 30 pages, 15 colour figure

Gorenstein toric Fano varieties

We investigate Gorenstein toric Fano varieties by combinatorial methods using the notion of a reflexive polytope which appeared in connection to mirror symmetry. The paper contains generalisations of tools and previously known results for nonsingular toric Fano varieties. As applications we obtain new classification results, bounds of invariants and formulate conjectures concerning combinatorial and geometrical properties of reflexive polytopes.Comment: AMS-LaTeX, 29 pages with 5 figure

Lattice polytopes of degree 2

A theorem of Scott gives an upper bound for the normalized volume of lattice polygons with exactly $i>0$ interior lattice points. We will show that the same bound is true for the normalized volume of lattice polytopes of degree 2 even in higher dimensions. In particular, there is only a finite number of quadratic polynomials with fixed leading coefficient being the $h^*$-polynomial of a lattice polytope.Comment: 8 page