Modularity of Calabi-Yau varieties and conformal field theory (Q943470)

This paper gives a survey on the modular properties of Calabi-Yau varieties from the conformal field theoretic point of view. The paper explains a possible correspondence between Calabi-Yau orbifolds of dimension one and conformal field theory. It is observed in three examples that an important link between these two objects is the Dedekind eta function. However, it is not clear if such a correspondence would extend to higher dimensional Calabi-Yau varieties, as not all modular forms are expressible in terms of the Dedekind eta function.