Complex projective surfaces and infinite groups

The paper contains a general construction which produces new examples of non simply-connected smooth projective surfaces. We analyze the resulting surfaces and their fundamental groups. Many of these fundamental groups are expected to be non-residually finite. Using the construction we also suggest a series of potential counterexamples to the Shafarevich conjecture which claims that the universal covering of smooth projective variety is holomorphically convex. The examples are only potential since they depend on group theoretic questions, which we formulate, but we do not know how to answer. At the end we formulate an arithmetic version of the Shafarevich conjecture.Comment: 29 pages, some comments and examples added LaTeX 2.0

Triadophilia: A Special Corner in the Landscape

It is well known that there are a great many apparently consistent vacua of string theory. We draw attention to the fact that there appear to be very few Calabi--Yau manifolds with the Hodge numbers h^{11} and h^{21} both small. Of these, the case (h^{11}, h^{21})=(3,3) corresponds to a manifold on which a three generation heterotic model has recently been constructed. We point out also that there is a very close relation between this manifold and several familiar manifolds including the `three-generation' manifolds with \chi=-6 that were found by Tian and Yau, and by Schimmrigk, during early investigations. It is an intriguing possibility that we may live in a naturally defined corner of the landscape. The location of these three generation models with respect to a corner of the landscape is so striking that we are led to consider the possibility of transitions between heterotic vacua. The possibility of these transitions, that we here refer to as transgressions, is an old idea that goes back to Witten. Here we apply this idea to connect three generation vacua on different Calabi-Yau manifolds.Comment: 41 pages 4 pdf figures, one is large. Improved discussion of the Gross-Popescu manifolds, Figure 4 added, additions to Table 1 and other minor correction

Holomorphic Vector Bundles and Non-Perturbative Vacua in M-Theory

We review the spectral cover formalism for constructing both U(n) and SU(n) holomorphic vector bundles on elliptically fibered Calabi-Yau three-folds which admit a section. We discuss the allowed bases of these three-folds and show that physical constraints eliminate Enriques surfaces from consideration. Relevant properties of the remaining del Pezzo and Hirzebruch surfaces are presented. Restricting the structure group to SU(n), we derive, in detail, a set of rules for the construction of three-family particle physics theories with phenomenologically relevant gauge groups. We show that anomaly cancellation generically requires the existence of non-perturbative vacua containing five-branes. We illustrate these ideas by constructing four explicit three-family non-perturbative vacua.Comment: 44 pages, Latex 2e with amsmath, typos correcte