Through the Looking Glass

Abstract

It is frequently possible to produce new Calabi-Yau threefolds from old ones by a process of allowing the complex structure to degenerate to a singular one, and then performing a resolution of singularities. (Some care is needed to ensure that the Calabi-Yau condition be preserved.) There has been speculation that all Calabi-Yau threefolds could be linked in this way, and considerable evidence has been amassed in this direction. We propose here a natural way to relate this construction to the string-theoretic phenomenon known as ``mirror symmetry.'' We formulate a conjecture which in principle could predict mirror partners for all Calabi-Yau threefolds, provided that all were indeed linked by the degeneration/resolution process. The conjecture produces new mirrors from old, and so requires some initial mirror manifold construction---such as Greene-Plesser orbifolding---as a starting point. (Lecture given at the CIRM conference, Trento, June 1994, and at the Workshop on Complex Geometry and Mirror Symmetry, Montr\'eal, March 1995.)Comment: latex2e, 22 pages with 1 figur