Max Kreuzer's Contributions to the Study of Calabi-Yau Manifolds

This is a somewhat personal account of the contributions of Max Kreuzer to the study of Calabi-Yau manifolds and has been prepared as a contribution to the Memorial Volume: Strings, Gauge Fields, and the Geometry Behind - The Legacy of Maximilian Kreuzer, to be published by World Scientific.Comment: 11 pages, pdflatex with pdf figure

Highly Symmetric Quintic Quotients

The quintic family must be the most studied family of Calabi-Yau threefolds. Particularly symmetric members of this family are known to admit quotients by freely acting symmetries isomorphic to $\mathbb{Z}_5 \times \mathbb{Z}_5$. The corresponding quotient manifolds may themselves be symmetric. That is, they may admit symmetries that descend from the symmetries that the manifold enjoys before the quotient is taken. The formalism for identifying these symmetries was given a long time ago by Witten and instances of these symmetric quotients were given also, for the family $\mathbb{P}^7[2, 2, 2, 2]$, by Goodman and Witten. We rework this calculation here, with the benefit of computer assistance, and provide a complete classification. Our motivation is largely to develop methods that apply also to the analysis of quotients of other CICY manifolds, whose symmetries have been classified recently. For the $\mathbb{Z}_5 \times \mathbb{Z}_5$ quotients of the quintic family, our list contains families of smooth manifolds with symmetry $\mathbb{Z}_4$, $\text{Dic}_3$ and $\text{Dic}_5$, families of singular manifolds with four conifold points, with symmetry $\mathbb{Z}_6$ and $\mathbb{Q}_8$, and rigid manifolds, each with at least a curve of singularities, and symmetry $\mathbb{Z}_{10}$. We intend to return to the computation of the symmetries of the quotients of other CICYs elsewhere.Comment: 18 pages, 8 table

New Calabi-Yau Manifolds with Small Hodge Numbers

It is known that many Calabi-Yau manifolds form a connected web. The question of whether all Calabi-Yau manifolds form a single web depends on the degree of singularity that is permitted for the varieties that connect the distinct families of smooth manifolds. If only conifolds are allowed then, since shrinking two-spheres and three-spheres to points cannot affect the fundamental group, manifolds with different fundamental groups will form disconnected webs. We examine these webs for the tip of the distribution of Calabi-Yau manifolds where the Hodge numbers (h^{11}, h^{21}) are both small. In the tip of the distribution the quotient manifolds play an important role. We generate via conifold transitions from these quotients a number of new manifolds. These include a manifold with \chi =-6 and manifolds with an attractive structure that may prove of interest for string phenomenology. We also examine the relation of some of these manifolds to the remarkable Gross-Popescu manifolds that have Euler number zero.Comment: 105 pages, pdflatex with about 70 pdf and jpeg figures. References corrected. Minor revisions to Fig1, and Table 9 extended to the range h^{11} + h^21 \leq 2

A Metric for Heterotic Moduli

Heterotic vacua of string theory are realised, at large radius, by a compact threefold with vanishing first Chern class together with a choice of stable holomorphic vector bundle. These form a wide class of potentially realistic four-dimensional vacua of string theory. Despite all their phenomenological promise, there is little understanding of the metric on the moduli space of these. What is sought is the analogue of special geometry for these vacua. The metric on the moduli space is important in phenomenology as it normalises D-terms and Yukawa couplings. It is also of interest in mathematics, since it generalises the metric, first found by Kobayashi, on the space of gauge field connections, to a more general context. Here we construct this metric, correct to first order in alpha', in two ways: first by postulating a metric that is invariant under background gauge transformations of the gauge field, and also by dimensionally reducing heterotic supergravity. These methods agree and the resulting metric is Kahler, as is required by supersymmetry. Checking that the metric is in fact Kahler is quite intricate and uses the anomaly cancellation equation for the H-field, in an essential way. The Kahler potential nevertheless takes a remarkably simple form: it is Kahler potential for special geometry with the Kahler form replaced by the alpha'-corrected hermitian form.Comment: 57 pages; v2 blackboard bold font error fixed; v3 minor improvements, typos fixed, references added; v4 version for publication in CM

Mirror Symmetry for Calabi-Yau Hypersurfaces in Weighted P_4 and Extensions of Landau Ginzburg Theory

Recently two groups have listed all sets of weights (k_1,...,k_5) such that the weighted projective space P_4^{(k_1,...,k_5)} admits a transverse Calabi-Yau hypersurface. It was noticed that the corresponding Calabi-Yau manifolds do not form a mirror symmetric set since some 850 of the 7555 manifolds have Hodge numbers (b_{11},b_{21}) whose mirrors do not occur in the list. By means of Batyrev's construction we have checked that each of the 7555 manifolds does indeed have a mirror. The `missing mirrors' are constructed as hypersurfaces in toric varieties. We show that many of these manifolds may be interpreted as non-transverse hypersurfaces in weighted P_4's, ie, hypersurfaces for which dp vanishes at a point other than the origin. This falls outside the usual range of Landau--Ginzburg theory. Nevertheless Batyrev's procedure provides a way of making sense of these theories.Comment: 29 pages, plain TeX. Two figures submitted separately as a uuencoded file. A plot at the end of the paper requires an extended memory version of TeX. Instructions for suppressing the plot included at head of source fil

F-theory, SO(32) and Toric Geometry

We show that the F-theory dual of the heterotic string with unbroken Spin(32)/Z_2 symmetry in eight dimensions can be described in terms of the same polyhedron that can also encode unbroken E_8\times E_8 symmetry. By considering particular compactifications with this K3 surface as a fiber, we can reproduce the recently found `record gauge group' in six dimensions and obtain a new `record gauge group' in four dimensions. Our observations relate to the toric diagram for the intersection of components of degenerate fibers and our definition of these objects, which we call `tops', is more general than an earlier definition by Candelas and Font

Calabi-Yau Manifolds Over Finite Fields, I

We study Calabi-Yau manifolds defined over finite fields. These manifolds have parameters, which now also take values in the field and we compute the number of rational points of the manifold as a function of the parameters. The intriguing result is that it is possible to give explicit expressions for the number of rational points in terms of the periods of the holomorphic three-form. We show also, for a one parameter family of quintic threefolds, that the number of rational points of the manifold is closely related to as the number of rational points of the mirror manifold. Our interest is primarily with Calabi-Yau threefolds however we consider also the interesting case of elliptic curves and even the case of a quadric in CP_1 which is a zero dimensional Calabi-Yau manifold. This zero dimensional manifold has trivial dependence on the parameter over C but a not trivial arithmetic structure.Comment: 75 pages, 6 eps figure

Calabi-Yau Manifolds Over Finite Fields, II

We study zeta-functions for a one parameter family of quintic threefolds defined over finite fields and for their mirror manifolds and comment on their structure. The zeta-function for the quintic family involves factors that correspond to a certain pair of genus 4 Riemann curves. The appearance of these factors is intriguing since we have been unable to `see' these curves in the geometry of the quintic. Having these zeta-functions to hand we are led to comment on their form in the light of mirror symmetry. That some residue of mirror symmetry survives into the zeta-functions is suggested by an application of the Weil conjectures to Calabi-Yau threefolds: the zeta-functions are rational functions and the degrees of the numerators and denominators are exchanged between the zeta-functions for the manifold and its mirror. It is clear nevertheless that the zeta-function, as classically defined, makes an essential distinction between Kahler parameters and the coefficients of the defining polynomial. It is an interesting question whether there is a `quantum modification' of the zeta-function that restores the symmetry between the Kahler and complex structure parameters. We note that the zeta-function seems to manifest an arithmetic analogue of the large complex structure limit which involves 5-adic expansion.Comment: Plain TeX, 50 pages, 4 eps figure

The Universal Geometry of Heterotic Vacua

We consider a family of perturbative heterotic string backgrounds. These are complex threefolds X with c_1 = 0, each with a gauge field solving the Hermitian Yang-Mill's equations and compatible B and H fields that satisfy the anomaly cancellation conditions. Our perspective is to consider a geometry in which these backgrounds are fibred over a parameter space. If the manifold X has coordinates x, and parameters are denoted by y, then it is natural to consider coordinate transformations x \to \tilde{x}(x,y) and y \to \tilde{y}(y). Similarly, gauge transformations of the gauge field and B field also depend on both x and y. In the process of defining deformations of the background fields that are suitably covariant under these transformations, it turns out to be natural to extend the gauge field A to a gauge field \IA on the extended (x,y)-space. Similarly, the B, H, and other fields are also extended. The total space of the fibration of the heterotic structures is the Universal Geometry of the title. The extension of gauge fields has been studied in relation to Donaldson theory and monopole moduli spaces. String vacua furnish a richer application of these ideas. One advantage of this point of view is that previously disparate results are unified into a simple tensor formulation. In a previous paper, by three of the present authors, the metric on the moduli space of heterotic theories was derived, correct through order \alpha', and it was shown how this was related to a simple Kahler potential. With the present formalism, we are able to rederive the results of this previously long and involved calculation, in less than a page.Comment: 50 pages, 3 figures, version accepted by JHEP, improved abstract and typos correcte