Lectures on the Calabi-Yau Landscape

Abstract: In these lecture notes, we survey the landscape of Calabi-Yau threefolds, and the use of machine learning to explore it. We begin with the compact portion of the landscape, focusing in particular on complete intersection Calabi-Yau varieties (CICYs) and elliptic fibrations. Non-compact Calabi-Yau manifolds are manifest in Type II superstring theories, they arise as representation varieties of quivers, used to describe gauge theories in the bulk familiar four dimensions. Finally, given the huge amount of Calabi-Yau data, whether and how machine learning can be applied to algebraic geometry and string landscape is also discussed. These notes are directed to the beginning graduate student interested in mathematics and in physics, and are based on lectures given by the 2nd author at the 2019 PIMS Summer School on Algebraic Geometry in High-Energy Physics at the University of Saskatchewan.