Degenerations and mirror contractions of Calabi-Yau complete intersections via Batyrev-Borisov Mirror symmetry

We show that the dual of the Cayley cone, associated to a Minkowski sum decomposition of a reflexive polytope, contains a reflexive polytope admitting a nef-partition. This nef-partition corresponds to a Calabi-Yau complete intersection in a Gorenstein Fano toric variety degenerating to an ample Calabi-Yau hypersurface in another Fano toric variety. Using the Batyrev-Borisov mirror symmetry construction, we found the mirror contraction of a Calabi-Yau complete intersection to the mirror of the ample Calabi-Yau hypersurface

Approximation by smooth curves near the tangent cone

AbstractWe show that through a point of an affine variety there always exists a smooth plane curve inside the ambient affine space, which has the multiplicity of intersection with the variety at least 3. This result has an application to the study of affine schemes

Deformations of Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces arising from deformations of toric varieties

There are easy "polynomial" deformations of Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces in toric varieties performed by changing the coefficients of the defining polynomial of the hypersurface. In this paper, we explicitly constructed the ``non-polynomial'' deformations of Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces, which arise from deformations of the ambient toric variety