The geometry underlying mirror symmetry

Abstract

The recent result of Strominger, Yau and Zaslow relating mirror symmetry to the quantum field theory notion of T-duality is reinterpreted as providing a way of characterizing geometrically which Calabi-Yau manifolds have mirror partners. The geometric description is rather surprising: one Calabi-Yau manifold should serve as a compactified, complexified moduli space for special Lagrangian tori on the other. We formulate some precise mathematical conjectures concerning how these moduli spaces are to be compactified and complexified, as well as a definition of geometric mirror pairs (in arbitrary dimension) which is independent of those conjectures. We investigate how this new geometric description ought to be related to the mathematical statements which have previously been extracted from mirror symmetry. In particular, we discuss how the moduli spaces of the ‘mirror’ Calabi-Yau manifolds should be related to one another, and how appropriate subspaces of the homology groups of those manifolds could be related. We treat the case of K3 surfaces in some detail.