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Penn Mathematics Colloquium

Wednesday, September 26, 2007 - 4:30pm

Denis Auroux

MIT

Location

University of Pennsylvania

DRL A6

Mirror symmetry in the complement of an anticanonical divisor.

Mirror symmetry predicts the existence of pairs of manifolds such that complex geometry on one corresponds to symplectic geometry on the other and vice-versa. In the case of Calabi-Yau manifolds, the Strominger-Yau-Zaslow conjecture gives a geometric procedure for constructing the mirror to a given manifold, by considering families of special Lagrangian tori inside it. Mirror symmetry has since then been extended to other settings, and the need for a geometric construction of the mirror in those settings therefore arises. The goal of this talk will be to describe how one can try to construct the mirror of a compact Kahler manifold whose anticanonical class is effective (for example a smooth Fano variety). For this purpose, we study moduli spaces of special Lagrangian tori, and show how the mirror superpotential arises from a count of holomorphic discs. The general features of the construction, including "quantum correction" phenomena, will be illustrated by considering a specific example: the complex projective plane.