Calabi-Yau compactification of type II string theories

Abstract: Superstring theories are the most promising theories for unified description of all fundamental interactions including gravity. However, these theories are formulated consistently only in 10 spacetime dimensions. Therefore, to connect to the observable world, it is required to compactify 6 out of those 10 dimensions in a suitable fashion. In this thesis, we mainly consider compactifications of type II string theories on Calabi-Yau threefolds. As a consequence, the resulting four dimensional theories preserve $\mathcal{N}=2$ supersymmetry. In these cases the metrics on the moduli spaces of the matter multiplets, vector and hypermultiplets, completely determine the low energy theories. Whereas the former are very well understood by now, the complete description of hypermultiplets is more complicated. In fact, hypermultiplets receive both perturbative and non-perturbative corrections. The thesis mainly pertains to the understanding of the non-perturbative corrections. Our findings for the hypermultiplets rely on the so called twistorial construction. We discuss this technique in details and use it throughout the course of this thesis. In particular, armed with this, and exploiting various symmetries, especially S-duality and mirror symmetry, we discuss the procedure to derive the D-brane and NS5-brane instanton corrections to the hypermultiplet moduli space.