Extremal bundles on Calabi-Yau threefolds (Q2018318)

Motivated by considerations coming from string theory compactifications, the authors study extremal vector bundles on Calabi-Yau threefolds, i.e. stable \(\mathrm{SU}(n)\) bundles which satisfy the cancellation of the Green-Schwarz anomaly. More explicitly, a stable vector bundle \(V\) on a Calabi-Yau threefold \(X\) is called extremal if (1) \(c_1(V)=0\) and (2) \(c_2(TX)=c_2(V)\). Most of the article takes an experimental point of view, using various databases of stable bundles on standard constructions of Calabi-Yau threefolds to determine the rarity of extremal bundles as well as bounds on their \(c_3(V)\). Section 3, however, is the theoretical core of the paper, where the authors first show that the spectral cover construction cannot produce extremal bundles on elliptic Calabi-Yau threefolds, which serve as the main testing ground for the authors' investigation. The authors are thus lead to consider a different construction that generalizes the classical Hartshorne-Serre correspondence and gives locally free sheaves of any rank \(n\). The essential idea is to use semi-continuity and openness of stability to find stable bundles in the same deformation space as \(\mathcal O_X^{n-1}\oplus I_C\) for some smooth curve \(C\), but not obtained simply as a non-trivial extension, as these are not always even reflexive sheaves. In rank two, for example, they first consider a coherent sheaf obtained as an extension \[ 0\to\mathcal O_X\to\mathcal E_0\to I_C\to 0, \] where \(C\) is a smooth curve in \(X\) with \([C]=c_2(TX)\), just as in the classical Serre construction. They consider a seemingly unrelated second extension \[ 0\to\mathcal O_X(-D)\to\mathcal E_1\to \tilde{\mathcal F}\to 0, \] where \(D\) is an ample divisor not containing \(C\) and \(\tilde{\mathcal F}\) is a torsion-free extension in \(\mathrm{Ext}^1(\mathcal O_D,I_C)\). The crucial observation is that \(\mathcal E_0\) and \(\mathcal E_1\) can also be seen as representing linearly independent classes \(v_0,v_1\) in some \textit{other} extension space, and by using semi-continuity, openness of stability, and the construction of \(\mathcal E_0,\mathcal E_1\), the authors are able to show that the generic member of the family of sheaves represented by \((1-t)v_0+tv_1,t\in\mathbb A^1\) is a stable bundle. The authors also consider which bundles of \textit{monad} type on CICY's (complete intersection Calabi-Yau's) satisfy the conditions of being extremal. In Section 4 of the article, the authors use the extremality conditions to translate the DRY conjecture, which gives sufficient conditions on topological invariants for the existence of a stable vector bundle with those invariants on a Calabi-Yau threefold \(X\), into a purely topological condition on \(X\). They then determine, for example, that all of the 7890 CICY's satisfy this topological condition upon using extremal bundles of \textit{monad} type, except for 37 self-mirror manifolds. The authors proceed similarly in Section 5 by studying the statistics of the bundles they consider with regard to extremality and the DRY conjecture. For extremal bundles, as an example, they plot the ``difference'' between \(\mathrm{ch}_2(V)\) and \(\mathrm{ch}_2(TX)\), appropriately defined as these represent 1-dimensional cycles, versus \(\mathrm{ch}_3(V)\) as \(X\) and \(V\) range over all possibilities in a given construction and rank. In this way, they obtain some interesting general trends for characteristic classes of known bundles.