English

Numerical Ricci-flat metrics on K3

High Energy Physics - Theory 2009-11-11 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology Differential Geometry

Abstract

We develop numerical algorithms for solving the Einstein equation on Calabi-Yau manifolds at arbitrary values of their complex structure and Kahler parameters. We show that Kahler geometry can be exploited for significant gains in computational efficiency. As a proof of principle, we apply our methods to a one-parameter family of K3 surfaces constructed as blow-ups of the T^4/Z_2 orbifold with many discrete symmetries. High-resolution metrics may be obtained on a time scale of days using a desktop computer. We compute various geometric and spectral quantities from our numerical metrics. Using similar resources we expect our methods to practically extend to Calabi-Yau three-folds with a high degree of discrete symmetry, although we expect the general three-fold to remain a challenge due to memory requirements.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.hep-th/0506129,
  title  = {Numerical Ricci-flat metrics on K3},
  author = {Matthew Headrick and Toby Wiseman},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-th/0506129},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

38 pages, 10 figures; program code and animations of figures downloadable from http://schwinger.harvard.edu/~wiseman/K3/ ; v2 minor corrections, references added

R2 v1 2026-07-22T15:30:34.795Z