Calabi-Yau manifolds as complete intersections in products of complex projective spaces (Q1087161)

The authors discuss Calabi-Yau manifolds - compact 3 dimensional complex Kähler manifolds with zero Ricci curvature. By a theorem of Yau a necessary and sufficient condition for this is that the manifold has vanishing first Chern class. For complete intersections in products of projective spaces the vanishing of the first Chern class is equivalent to a simple set of conditions on the multi degrees of the defining equations. With these multi degrees fixed one obtains a single deformation type of Calabi-Yau manifolds. The authors investigate the smallest dimensions in which these manifolds can be realized and compute the Betti numbers in some cases, using the Lefschetz hyperplane theorem.