Calabi-Yau Spaces in the String Landscape

Calabi-Yau spaces, or Kähler spaces admitting zero Ricci curvature, have played a pivotal role in theoretical physics and pure mathematics for the last half century. In physics, they constituted the first and natural solution to compactification of superstring theory to our 4-dimensional universe, primarily due to one of their equivalent definitions being the admittance of covariantly constant spinors. Since the mid-1980s, physicists and mathematicians have joined forces in creating explicit examples of Calabi-Yau spaces, compiling databases of formidable size, including the complete intersecion (CICY) data set, the weighted hypersurfaces data set, the elliptic-fibration data set, the Kreuzer-Skarke toric hypersurface data set, generalized CICYs, etc., totaling at least on the order of 1010 manifolds. These all contribute to the vast string landscape, the multitude of possible vacuum solutions to string compactification. More recently, this collaboration has been enriched by computer science and data science, the former in bench-marking the complexity of the algorithms in computing geometric quantities, and the latter in applying techniques such as machine learning in extracting unexpected information. These endeavours, inspired by the physics of the string landscape, have rendered the investigation of Calabi-Yau spaces one of the most exciting and interdisciplinary fields.