Toric elliptic fibrations and F-theory compactifications

Abstract

The 102581 flat toric elliptic fibrations over P^2 are identified among the Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces that arise from the 473800776 reflexive 4-dimensional polytopes. In order to analyze their elliptic fibration structure, we describe the precise relation between the lattice polytope and the elliptic fibration. The fiber-divisor-graph is introduced as a way to visualize the embedding of the Kodaira fibers in the ambient toric fiber. In particular in the case of non-split discriminant components, this description is far more accurate than previous studies. The discriminant locus and Kodaria fibers groups of all 102581 elliptic fibrations are computed. The maximal gauge group is SU(27), which would naively be in contradiction with 6-dimensional anomaly cancellation.