Non-liftable Calabi-Yau spaces

We construct many new non-liftable three-dimensional Calabi-Yau spaces in positive characteristic. The technique relies on lifting a nodal model to a smooth rigid Calabi-Yau space over some number field as introduced by the first author and D. van Straten.Comment: 16 pages, 5 tables; v2: minor corrections and addition

Generalized Borcea-Voisin Construction

C. Voisin and C. Borcea have constructed mirror pairs of families of Calabi-Yau threefolds by taking the quotient of the product of an elliptic curve with a K3 surface endowed with a non-symplectic involution. In this paper, we generalize the construction of Borcea and Voisin to any prime order and build three and four dimensional Calabi-Yau orbifolds. We classify the topological types that are obtained and show that, in dimension 4, orbifolds built with an involution admit a crepant resolution and come in topological mirror pairs. We show that for odd primes, there are generically no minimal resolutions and the mirror pairing is lost.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figures. v2: typos corrected & references adde

On the monodromy of the moduli space of Calabi-Yau threefolds coming from eight planes in P3\mathbb{P}^3

It is a fundamental problem in geometry to decide which moduli spaces of polarized algebraic varieties are embedded by their period maps as Zariski open subsets of locally Hermitian symmetric domains. In the present work we prove that the moduli space of Calabi-Yau threefolds coming from eight planes in $\mathbb{P}^3$ does {\em not} have this property. We show furthermore that the monodromy group of a good family is Zariski dense in the corresponding symplectic group. Moreover, we study a natural sublocus which we call hyperelliptic locus, over which the variation of Hodge structures is naturally isomorphic to wedge product of a variation of Hodge structures of weight one. It turns out the hyperelliptic locus does not extend to a Shimura subvariety of type III (Siegel space) within the moduli space. Besides general Hodge theory, representation theory and computational commutative algebra, one of the proofs depends on a new result on the tensor product decomposition of complex polarized variations of Hodge structures.Comment: 26 page