Calabi-Yau Spaces in the String Landscape

Abstract: Calabi-Yau spaces, or Kahler spaces admitting zero Ricci curvature, have played a pivotal role in theoretical physics and pure mathematics for the last half-century. In physics, they constituted the first and natural solution to compactification of superstring theory to our 4-dimensional universe, primarily due to one of their equivalent definitions being the admittance of covariantly constant spinors. Since the mid-1980s, physicists and mathematicians have joined forces in creating explicit examples of Calabi-Yau spaces, compiling databases of formidable size, including the complete intersecion (CICY) dataset, the weighted hypersurfaces dataset, the elliptic-fibration dataset, the Kreuzer-Skarke toric hypersurface dataset, generalized CICYs etc., totaling at least on the order of 10^10 manifolds. These all contribute to the vast string landscape, the multitude of possible vacuum solutions to string compactification. More recently, this collaboration has been enriched by computer science and data science, the former, in bench-marking the complexity of the algorithms in computing geometric quantities and the latter, in applying techniques such as machine-learning in extracting unexpected information. These endeavours, inspired by the physics of the string landscape, have rendered the investigation of Calabi-Yau spaces one of the most exciting and inter-disciplinary fields. Invited contribution to the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Physics, B.~Foster Ed., OUP, 2020