The study of the geometry of Calabi-Yau fourfolds is relevant for compactifications of string theory, M-theory, and F-theory to various dimensions. This work introduces the mathematical machinery to derive the complete moduli dependence of the periods of non-trivial three-forms for fourfolds realized as hypersurfaces in toric ambient spaces. It sets the stage to determine Picard-Fuchs-type differential equations and integral expressions for these forms. The key tool is the observation that non-trivial three-forms on hypersurfaces in toric ambient spaces always stem from divisors that are build out of toric resolution trees fibered over Riemann surfaces. The three-form periods are then non-trivially related to the one-form periods of these surfaces. In general, the three-form periods are known to vary holomorphically over the complex structure moduli space and play an important role in the effective actions arising in fourfold compactifications. We discuss two explicit example fourfolds for F-theory compactifications in which the three-form periods determine axion decay constants.
In this work we study the quantum periods together with their Picard-Fuchs differential equations of Calabi-Yau fourfolds. In contrast to Calabi-Yau threefolds, we argue that the large volume points of Calabi-Yau fourfolds generically are regular singular points of the Picard-Fuchs operators of non-maximally unipotent monodromy. We demonstrate this property in explicit examples of Calabi-Yau fourfolds with a single Kahler modulus. For these examples we construct integral quantum periods and study their global properties in the quantum Kahler moduli space with the help of numerical analytic con…
In this note, we prove combinatorial formulas for $h^{2,1}$ of prime toric divisors in an arbitrary toric hypersurface Calabi-Yau fourfold $Y_4.$ We show that it is possible to find a toric hypersurface Calabi-Yau in which there are more than $h^{1,1}(Y_4)$ non-perturbative superpotential terms with trivial intermediate Jacobian. Hodge numbers of divisors in toric CICYs are the subjects of the part two.
We study M-theory on a Calabi-Yau fourfold with a smooth surface $S$ of $A_{N-1}$ singularities. The resulting three-dimensional theory has a $\mathcal{N}=2$ $SU(N)$ gauge theory sector, which we obtain from a twisted dimensional reduction of a seven-dimensional $\mathcal{N}=1$ $SU(N)$ gauge theory on the surface $S$. A variant of the Vafa-Witten equations governs the moduli space of the gauge theory, which, for a trivial $SU(N)$ principal bundle over $S$, admits a Coulomb and a Higgs branch. In M-theory these two gauge theory branches arise from a resolution and a deformation to smooth Calabi…
We discuss some aspects of F-theory in four dimensions on elliptically fibered Calabi-Yau fourfolds which are Calabi-Yau threefold fibrations. A particularly simple class of such manifolds emerges for fourfolds in which the generic Calabi-Yau threefold fiber is itself an elliptic fibration and is K3 fibered. Duality between F-theory compactified on Calabi-Yau fourfolds and heterotic strings on Calabi-Yau threefolds puts constraints on the cohomology of the fourfold. By computing the Hodge diamond of Calabi-Yau fourfolds we provide first numerical evidence for F-theory dualities in four dimensi…
In this paper, we first derive an intrinsic definition of classical triple intersection numbers of K_S, where S is a complex toric surface, and use this to compute the extended Picard-Fuchs system of K_S of our previous paper, without making use of the instanton expansion. We then extend this formalism to local fourfolds K_X, where X is a complex 3-fold. As a result, we are able to fix the prepotential of local Calabi-Yau threefolds K_S up to polynomial terms of degree 2. We then outline methods of extending the procedure to non canonical bundle cases.
For any given dimension $d$, all reflexive $d$-polytopes can be found (in principle) as subpolytopes of a number of maximal polyhedra that are defined in terms of $(d+1)$-tuples of integers (weights), or combinations of $k$-tuples of weights with $k<d+1$. We present the results of a complete classification of sextuples of weights pertaining to the construction of all reflexive polytopes in five dimensions. We find 322 383 760 930 such weight systems. 185 269 499 015 of them give rise directly to reflexive polytopes and thereby to mirror pairs of Calabi-Yau fourfolds. These lead to 532 600 483 …
The study of the geometry of Calabi-Yau fourfolds is relevant for compactifications of string theory, M-theory, and F-theory to various dimensions. In the first part of this thesis, we study the action of mirror symmetry on two-dimensional $\cN=(2,2)$ effective theories obtained by compactifying Type IIA string theory on Calabi-Yau fourfolds. Our focus is on fourfold geometries with non-trivial three-form cohomology. The couplings of the massless zero-modes arising from an expansion of the three-form gauge-potential into these forms depend both on the complex structure deformations and the Käh…
We give a new example of a compact manifold with holonomy Spin(7) from a Beauville's Calabi-Yau fourfold. Its construction is very concrete, starting with products of elliptic curves with complex multiplications --- so probably more accessible to physicists.
We investigate a (0,2) gauge theory realized on the world volume of the type IIB D1-brane at the singular point of a Calabi-Yau fourfold. It is argued that the gauge anomaly can be canceled via coupling to the R-R chiral bosons in bulk IIB string. We find that for a generic choice of the Fayet-Iliopoulos parameters on the world volume, the Higgs moduli space is a smooth fourfold birational to the original Calabi-Yau fourfold, but is not necessarily a Calabi-Yau manifold.
In this paper, we explicitly construct the smooth compact base threefold for the elliptic Calabi-Yau fourfold with the largest known $h^{1,1}=303\,148$. It is generated by blowing up a smooth toric "seed" base threefold with $(E_8,E_8,E_8)$ collisions. The 4d F-theory compactification model over it has the largest geometric gauge group, $E_8^{2\,561}\times F_4^{7\,576}\times G_2^{20\,168}\times SU(2)^{30\,200}$, and the largest number of axions, $181\,820$, in the known 4d $\mathcal{N}=1$ supergravity landscape. We also prove that there are at least $1100^{15\,048}\approx 7.5\times 10^{45\,766…
We show that "non-polynomial" deformations of semiample (minimal) nondegenerate Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces in complete simplicial toric varieties can be realized as quasismooth complete intersections in higher dimensional simplicial toric varieties.
We perform the Kaluza-Klein reduction of M-theory on warped Calabi-Yau fourfolds with non-trivial four-form flux turned on. The resulting scalar- and superpotential is computed and compared with the superpotential obtained by Gukov, Vafa and Witten using different methods.
Using recent results on eleven-dimensional superspace, we compute the contribution of fivebrane instantons with four fermionic zeromodes in M-theory compactifications on Calabi-Yau fourfolds with flux. We find that no superpotential is generated in this case. This result is compatible with a certain flux-dependent modification of the arithmetic genus criterion.
We study quantum Kahler moduli space of Calabi-Yau fourfolds. Our analysis is based on the recent work by Jockers et al. which gives a novel method to compute the Kahler potential on the quantum Kahler moduli space of Calabi-Yau manifold. In contrast to Calabi-Yau threefold, the quantum nature of higher dimensional Calabi-Yau manifold is yet to be fully elucidated. In this paper we focus on the Calabi-Yau fourfold. In particular, we conjecture the explicit form of the quantum-corrected Kahler potential. We also compute the genus zero Gromov-Witten invariants and test our conjecture by comparin…
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.
We show that equivariant elliptic genera of toric Calabi-Yau 3-folds are generalized weak Jacobi forms. We also introduce a notion of averaged equivariant elliptic genera of toric Calabi-Yau 3-folds, and show that they are ordinary weak Jacobi forms given by an explicit formula predicted by Eguchi and Sugawara.
We consider splitting type phase transitions between Calabi-Yau fourfolds. These transitions generalize previously known types of conifold transitions between threefolds. Similar to conifold configurations the singular varieties mediating the transitions between fourfolds connect moduli spaces of different dimensions, describing ground states in M- and F-theory with different numbers of massless modes as well as different numbers of cycles to wrap various p-branes around. The web of Calabi-Yau fourfolds obtained in this way contains the class of all complete intersection manifolds embedded in …
We discuss the period geometry and the topological string amplitudes on elliptically fibered Calabi-Yau fourfolds in toric ambient spaces. In particular, we describe a general procedure to fix integral periods. Using some elementary facts from homological mirror symmetry we then obtain Bridgelands involution and its monodromy action on the integral basis for non-singular elliptically fibered fourfolds. The full monodromy group contains a subgroup that acts as PSL(2,Z) on the Kähler modulus of the fiber and we analyze the consequences of this modularity for the genus zero and genus one amplitud…
The four-form field strength in F-theory compactifications on Calabi-Yau fourfolds takes its value in the middle cohomology group $H^4$. The middle cohomology is decomposed into a vertical, a horizontal and a remaining component, all three of which are present in general. We argue that a flux along the remaining or vertical component may break some symmetry, while a purely horizontal flux does not influence the unbroken part of the gauge group or the net chirality of charged matter fields. This makes the decomposition crucial to the counting of flux vacua in the context of F-theory GUTs. We us…
We study the limit of Calabi-Yau modular forms, and in particular, those resulting in classical modular forms. We then study two parameter families of elliptically fibred Calabi-Yau fourfolds and describe the modular forms arising from the degeneracy loci. In the case of elliptically fibred Calabi-Yau threefolds our approach gives a mathematical proof of many observations about modularity properties of topological string amplitudes starting with the work of Candelas, Font, Katz and Morrison. In the case of Calabi-Yau fourfolds we derive new identities not computed before.
Using Cayley trick, we define the notions of mixed toric residues and mixed Hessians associated with $r$ Laurent polynomials $f_1,...,f_r$.We conjecture that the values of mixed toric residues on the mixed Hessians are determined by mixed volumes of the Newton polytopes of $f_1,...,f_r$. Using mixed toric residues, we generalize our Toric Residue Mirror Conjecture to the case of Calabi-Yau complete intersections in Gorenstein toric Fano varieties obtained from nef-partitions of reflexive polytopes.
Two-dimensional hybrid superstring on singular Calabi-Yau manifolds is studied by the field redefinition of the NSR formalism. The compactification on singular Calabi-Yau fourfold is described by N=2 super-Liouville theory and N=2 Landau-Ginzburg models. We examine the world-sheet topological N=4 superconformal algebra, which is useful to identify physical states of the theory. It is shown that the space-time superconformal symmetry is not compatible with this original topological algebra. A new model is proposed by modifying the topological superconformal generators, which is consistent with …
We give some simple examples of mirror Calabi-Yau fourfolds in Type II string theory. These are realised as toroidal orbifolds. Motivated by the Strominger, Yau, Zaslow argument we give explicitly the mirror transformation which maps Type IIA/IIB on such a fourfold to Type IIA/IIB on the mirror. The mirrors are related by the inclusion/exclusion of discrete torsion. Implicit in the result is a confirmation of mirror symmetry to genus $g$ in the string path integral. Finally, by considering the relationship between M-theory and Type IIA theory, we show how in M-theory on mirror Calabi-Yau fourf…
In the context of string dualities, fibration structures of Calabi-Yau manifolds play a prominent role. In particular, elliptic and K3 fibered Calabi-Yau fourfolds are important for dualities between string compactifications with four flat space-time dimensions. A natural framework for studying explicit examples of such fibrations is given by Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces in toric varieties, because this class of varieties is sufficiently large to provide examples with very different features while still allowing a large degree of explicit control. In this paper, many examples for elliptic K3 fiber…
In this note we consider M-theory compactified on a warped Calabi-Yau fourfold including the eight-derivative terms in the eleven-dimensional action known in the literature. We dimensionally reduce this theory on geometries with one Kahler modulus and determine the resulting three-dimensional Kahler potential and complex coordinate. The logarithmic form of the corrections suggests that they might admit a physical interpretation in terms of one-loop corrections to the effective action. Including only the known terms the no-scale condition in three dimensions is broken, but we discuss caveats to…
We derive the combinatorial representations of Picard group and deformation space of anti-canonical hypersurfaces of a toric variety using techniques in toric geometry. The mirror cohomology correspondence in the context of mirror symmetry is established for a pair of Calabi-Yau (CY) ${\sf n}$-spaces in toric varieties defined by reflexive polytopes for an arbitrary dimension ${\sf n}$. We further identify the Kahler cone of the toric variety and degeneration cone of CY hypersurfaces, by which the Kahler cone and degeneration cone for a mirror CY pair are interchangeable under mirror symmetry.…
We present compact three-generation F-theory GUT models meeting in particular the constraints of D3-tadpole cancellation and D-term supersymmetry. To this end we explicitly construct elliptically fibered Calabi-Yau fourfolds as complete intersections in a toric ambient space. Toric methods enable us to control the singular geometry of the SU(5) GUT model. The GUT brane wraps a non-generic del Pezzo surface admitting GUT symmetry breaking via hypercharge flux. It is contractible to a curve and we demonstrate the existence of a consistent decoupling limit. We compute the Euler characteristic of …
Motivated by previous computations of Y. Cao, M. Kool and the author, we propose square roots and sign rules for the vertex and edge terms that compute Donaldson-Thomas invariants of a toric Calabi-Yau 4-fold, and prove that they are canonical, exploiting the combinatorics of plane and solid partitions.
We study the action of mirror symmetry on two-dimensional N=(2,2) effective theories obtained by compactifying Type IIA string theory on Calabi-Yau fourfolds. Our focus is on fourfold geometries with non-trivial three-form cohomology. The couplings of the massless zero-modes arising by expanding in these forms depend both on the complex structure deformations and the Kahler structure deformations of the Calabi-Yau fourfold. We argue that two holomorphic functions of the deformation moduli capture this information. These are exchanged under mirror symmetry, which allows us to derive them at the…
In Calabi-Yau fourfold compactifications of M-theory with flux, we investigate the possibility of partial supersymmetry breaking in the three-dimensional effective theory. To this end, we place the effective theory in the framework of general N=2 gauged supergravities, in the special case where only translational symmetries are gauged. This allows us to extract supersymmetry-breaking conditions, and interpret them as conditions on the 4-form flux and Calabi-Yau geometry. For N=2 unbroken supersymmetry in three dimensions we recover previously known results, and we find a new condition for brea…
We review the Kaluza-Klein reduction of Type IIA string theory on Calabi-Yau fourfolds and apply mirror symmetry to the resulting two-dimensional $ \mathcal{N}=(2,2) $ effective theories. In the course of the reduction we focus especially on non-trivial three-form cohomology on these fourfolds and investigate the couplings of the corresponding massless zero-modes. These show a dependence on both complex structure as well as Kähler structure deformations and we provide evidence that they are determined by two holomorphic functions that get exchanged via mirror symmetry. Application of the mirro…
We find through a systematic analysis that all but 29,223 of the 473.8 million 4D reflexive polytopes found by Kreuzer and Skarke have a 2D reflexive subpolytope. Such a subpolytope is generally associated with the presence of an elliptic or genus one fibration in the corresponding birational equivalence class of Calabi-Yau threefolds. This extends the growing body of evidence that most Calabi-Yau threefolds have an elliptically fibered phase.
We study the B-model chiral ring of Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces in Batyrev's mirror construction. The main result is an explicit description of a subring of the chiral ring of semiample regular (transversal to torus orbits) Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces. This subring includes the marginal operators and contains all information about the correlation functions used by physicists. Computation of the chiral ring passes through a description of cohomology of semiample hypersurfaces. Here, we develop the techniques for calculating of the cohomology of resolutions.
We study, as hypersurfaces in toric varieties, elliptic Calabi-Yau fourfolds for F-theory compactifications dual to E8xE8 heterotic strings compactified to four dimensions on elliptic Calabi-Yau threefolds with some choice of vector bundle. We describe how to read off the vector bundle data for the heterotic compactification from the toric data of the fourfold. This map allows us to construct, for example, Calabi-Yau fourfolds corresponding to three generation models with unbroken GUT groups. We also find that the geometry of the Calabi-Yau fourfold restricts the heterotic vector bundle data i…
Special fibrations of toric varieties have been used by physicists, e.g. the school of Candelas, to construct dual pairs in the study of Het/F-theory duality. Motivated by this, we investigate in this paper the details of toric morphisms between toric varieties. In particular, a complete toric description of fibers - both generic and non-generic -, image, and the flattening stratification of a toric morphism are given. Two examples are provided to illustrate the discussions. We then turn to the study of the restriction of a toric morphism to a toric hypersurface. The details of this can be und…
We investigate topological properties of Calabi-Yau fourfolds and consider a wide class of explicit constructions in weighted projective spaces and, more generally, toric varieties. Divisors which lead to a non-perturbative superpotential in the effective theory have a very simple description in the toric construction. Relevant properties of them follow just by counting lattice points and can be also used to construct examples with negative Euler number. We study nets of transitions between cases with generically smooth elliptic fibres and cases with ADE gauge symmetries in the N=1 theory due …
Looking for string vacua with fixed moduli, we study compactifications of type IIA string theory on Calabi-Yau fourfolds in the presence of generic Ramond-Ramond fields. We explicitly derive the (super)potential induced by Ramond-Ramond fluxes performing a Kaluza-Klein reduction of the ten-dimensional effective action. This can be conveniently achieved in a formulation of the massive type IIA supergravity where all Ramond-Ramond fields appear in a democratic way. The result agrees with the general formula for the superpotential written in terms of calibrations. We further notice that for gener…
We consider regular Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces in $N$-dimensional smooth toric varieties. On such a hypersurface in the neighborhood of the large complex structure limit point we construct a fibration over a sphere $S^{N-1}$ whose generic fibers are tori $T^{N-1}$. Also for certain one-parameter families of such hypersurfaces we show that the monodromy transformation is induced by a translation of the $T^{N-1}$ fibration by a section. Finally we construct a dual fibration and provide some evidence that it describes the mirror family.
In this paper, we give a construction of the global Chern-Simons functions for toric Calabi-Yau stacks of dimension three using strong exceptional collections. The moduli spaces of sheaves on such stacks can be identified with critical loci of these functions. We give two applications of these functions. First, we prove Joyce's integrality conjecture of generalized DT invariants on local surfaces. Second, we prove a dimension reduction formula for virtual motives, which leads to two recursion formulas for motivic Donaldson-Thomas invariants.
We develop a combinatorial approach to the construction of general smooth compact base surfaces that support elliptic Calabi-Yau threefolds. This extends previous analyses that have relied on toric or semi-toric structure. The resulting algorithm is used to construct all classes of such base surfaces $S$ with $h^{1, 1} (S) < 8$ and all base surfaces over which there is an elliptically fibered Calabi-Yau threefold $X$ with Hodge number $h^{2, 1} (X) \geq 150$. These two sets can be used todescribe all 6D F-theory models that have fewer than seven tensor multiplets or more than 150 neutral scala…
We systematically analyze the fibration structure of toric hypersurface Calabi-Yau threefolds with large and small Hodge numbers. We show that there are only four such Calabi-Yau threefolds with $h^{1, 1} \geq 140$ or $h^{2, 1} \geq 140$ that do not have manifest elliptic or genus one fibers arising from a fibration of the associated 4D polytope. There is a genus one fibration whenever either Hodge number is 150 or greater, and an elliptic fibration when either Hodge number is 228 or greater. We find that for small $h^{1, 1}$ the fraction of polytopes in the KS database that do not have a genu…
We identify a class of autoequivalences of triangulated categories of singularities associated with Calabi-Yau complete intersections in toric varieties. Elements of this class satisfy relations that are directly linked to the toric data.
We explain how to form a novel dataset of simply connected Calabi-Yau threefolds via the Gross-Siebert algorithm. We expect these to degenerate to Calabi-Yau toric hypersurfaces with certain Gorenstein (not necessarily isolated) singularities. In particular, we explain how to `smooth the boundary' of a class of $4$-dimensional reflexive polytopes to obtain a polarised tropical manifolds. We compute topological invariants of a compactified torus fibration over each such tropical manifold, expected to be homotopy equivalent to the general fibre of the Gross-Siebert smoothing. We consider a famil…
Using a reconstruction theorem, we prove that the supersymmetry conditions for a certain class of flux backgrounds are equivalent with a tractable subsystem of relations on differential forms which encodes the full set of contraints arising fom Fierz identities and from the differential and algebraic conditions on the internal part of the supersymmetry generators. The result makes use of the formulation of such problems through Kähler-Atiyah bundles, which we developed in previous work. Applying this to the most general ${\cal N}=2$ flux compactifications of 11-dimensional supergravity on 8-ma…
We study BPS spectra of D-branes on local Calabi-Yau threefolds $\mathcal{O}(-p)\oplus\mathcal{O}(p-2)\to \mathbb{P}^1$ with $p=0,1$, corresponding to $\mathbb{C}^3/\mathbb{Z}_{2}$ and the resolved conifold. Nonabelianization for exponential networks is applied to compute directly unframed BPS indices counting states with D2 and D0 brane charges. Known results on these BPS spectra are correctly reproduced by computing new types of BPS invariants of 3d-5d BPS states, encoded by nonabelianization, through their wall-crossing. We also develop the notion of exponential BPS graphs for the simplest …
We analyze B-type D-branes on noncompact toric Calabi--Yau spaces. A general program is presented to find a set of tilting line bundles that yields the associated quiver and its relations. In many cases, this set remains fixed as one moves between phases in the Kähler moduli space. This gives a particularly simple picture of how the derived category remains invariant across all phases. The combinatorial problems involving local cohomology used to determine the tilting set are also related to questions of Pi-stability as one moves between phases. As a result, in some cases precisely those line …
We consider topology changing transitions for M-theory compactifications on Calabi-Yau fourfolds with background G-flux. The local geometry of the transition is generically a genus g curve of conifold singularities, which engineers a 3d gauge theory with four supercharges, near the intersection of Coulomb and Higgs branches. We identify a set of canonical, minimal flux quanta which solve the local quantization condition on G for a given geometry, including new solutions in which the flux is neither of horizontal nor vertical type. A local analysis of the flux superpotential shows that the pote…
We compactify four-dimensional N=1 gauged supergravity theories on a circle including fluxes for shift-symmetric scalars. Four-dimensional Taub-NUT gravitational instantons universally correct the three-dimensional superpotential in the absence of fluxes. In the presence of fluxes these Taub-NUT instanton contributions are no longer gauge-invariant. Invariance can be restored by gauge instantons on top of Taub-NUT instantons. We establish the embedding of this scenario into M-theory. Circle fluxes and gaugings arise from a restricted class of M-theory four-form fluxes on a resolved Calabi-Yau …
During the last years we have generated a large number of data related to Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces in toric varieties which can be described by reflexive polyhedra. We classified all reflexive polyhedra in three dimensions leading to K3 hypersurfaces and have nearly completed the four dimensional case relevant to Calabi-Yau threefolds. In addition, we have analysed for many of the resulting spaces whether they allow fibration structures of the types that are relevant in the context of superstring dualities. In this survey we want to give background information both on how we obtained these dat…
We compare the sets of Calabi-Yau threefolds with large Hodge numbers that are constructed using toric hypersurface methods with those can be constructed as elliptic fibrations using Weierstrass model techniques motivated by F-theory. There is a close correspondence between the structure of "tops" in the toric polytope construction and Tate form tunings of Weierstrass models for elliptic fibrations. We find that all of the Hodge number pairs ($h^{1, 1},h^{2, 1}$) with $h^{1,1}$ or $h^{2, 1}\geq 240$ that are associated with threefolds in the Kreuzer-Skarke database can be realized explicitly b…
We analyze freely-acting discrete symmetries of Calabi-Yau three-folds defined as hypersurfaces in ambient toric four-folds. An algorithm which allows the systematic classification of such symmetries which are linearly realised on the toric ambient space is devised. This algorithm is applied to all Calabi-Yau manifolds with $h^{1,1}(X)\leq 3$ obtained by triangulation from the Kreuzer-Skarke list, a list of some $350$ manifolds. All previously known freely-acting symmetries on these manifolds are correctly reproduced and we find five manifolds with freely-acting symmetries. These include a sin…
The open string sector of the topological B-model on CY $(m+2)$-folds is described by $m$-graded quivers with superpotentials. This correspondence generalizes the connection between CY $(m+2)$-folds and gauge theories on the worldvolume of D$(5-2m)$-branes for $m=0,\ldots,3$ to arbitrary $m$. In this paper we introduce the Calabi-Yau product, a new algorithm that starting from the known quiver theories for a pair of toric CY$_{m+2}$ and CY$_{n+2}$ produces the quiver theory for a related CY$_{m+n+3}$. This method significantly supersedes existing ones, enabling the simple determination of quiv…
These lecture notes are an introduction to toric geometry. Particular focus is put on the description of toric local Calabi-Yau varieties, such as needed in applications to the AdS/CFT correspondence in string theory. The point of view taken in these lectures is mostly algebro-geometric but no prior knowledge of algebraic geometry is assumed. After introducing the necessary mathematical definitions, we discuss the construction of toric varieties as holomorphic quotients. We discuss the resolution and deformation of toric Calabi-Yau singularities. We also explain the gauged linear sigma-model (…
