Applications of Toric Birational Geometry to String Compactifications

Elijah Sheridan (Cornell U, Ithaca)

Jul 08. 2026, 11:30 — 12:15

Birational geometry plays an important role in string theory, principally because of how it controls moduli spaces. The ubiquity of toric varieties and their subvarieties in string compactifications thus motivates the study of birational geometry in the toric setting. In this talk, I will discuss some recent formal and computational advances in this direction, including how the Kahler moduli space of Kreuzer–Skarke Calabi–Yau threefolds extends beyond FRSTs and how the birational and enumerative geometry of toric subvariety Calabi–Yau threefolds can be extracted from simple toric computations. I will also discuss how birational data additionally facilitates the algorithmic computation of global sections of line bundles.

Further Information
Venue:
ESI Boltzmann Lecture Hall
Associated Event:
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Toric Geometry: Bridging Mathematics, Computation, and String Theory (Thematic Programme)
Organizer(s):
Magdalena Larfors (Uppsala U)
Gary Shiu (U of Wisconsin-Madison)
Harald Skarke (TU Wien)
Michael E. Stillman (Cornell U, Ithaca)