Extremal transitions from nested reflexive polytopes (Q2339206)

The paper is devoted to studying a question of when an inclusion of reflexive polytopes gives a geometric transition between the associated Calabi-Yau families. It is proved that this is true in dimensions two and three and in higher dimensions certain obstructions may occur. \textit{V. V. Batyrev}'s construction [J. Algebr. Geom. 3, No. 3, 493--535 (1994; Zbl 0829.14023)] produces a family of Calabi-Yay hypersurfaces from a reflexive polytope in a resolution of its toric variety. The author constructs a smooth projective Calabi-Yau threefold family which is birational to one of the Batyrev's hypersurface families, but topologically distinct from all such families.