Recounting special Lagrangian cycles in twistor families of K3 surfaces (or: How I learned to stop worrying and count BPS states)

Abstract

We consider asymptotics of certain BPS state counts in M-theory compactified on a K3 surface. Our investigation is parallel to (and was inspired by) recent work in the mathematics literature by Filip, who studied the asymptotic count of special Lagrangian fibrations of a marked K3 surface, with fibers of volume at most $V_*$, in a generic twistor family of K3 surfaces. We provide an alternate proof of Filip's results by adapting tools that Douglas and collaborators have used to count flux vacua and attractor black holes. We similarly relate BPS state counts in 4d ${\cal N}=2$ supersymmetric gauge theories to certain counting problems in billiard dynamics and provide a simple proof of an old result in this field.