Toric Degenerations of Fano Varieties and Constructing Mirror Manifolds (Q4650865)

This expository paper presents the author's method for constructing mirror manifolds. He first presents the method of Kapur-Madlener and Robiano-Sweedler for the construction of degenerations of unirational varieties \(X\) to toric varieties \(Y\) using canonical subalgebra bases. The main part of the paper contains a presentation of the ``small toric degenerations'' of Fano varieties introduced by \textit{V. V. Batyrev, I. Ciocan-Fontanine, B. Kim} and \textit{D. van Straten} [Nucl. Phys., B 154, 640--666 (1998; Zbl 0896.14025)] and its applications to the mirror construction of Calabi-Yau complete intersections [cf. \textit{V. V. Batyrev} and \textit{D. van Straten}, Commun. Math. Phys. 168, 493--533 (1995; Zbl 0843.14016)]. The author carefully motivates his definitions and constructions, gives complete proofs and exposes several consistent examples. He finally proposes two problems arising from his generalized mirror construction. For the entire collection see [Zbl 1051.00013].