A D5 elliptic fibration is a fibration whose generic fiber is modeled by the complete intersection of two quadric surfaces in P3. They provide simple examples of elliptic fibrations admitting a rich spectrum of singular fibers (not all on the list of Kodaira) without introducing singularities in the total space of the fibration and therefore avoiding a discussion of their resolutions. We study systematically the fiber geometry of such fibrations using Segre symbols and compute several topological invariants.

Using canonical 1-parameter family of Hermitian connections on the tangent bundle, we provide invariant solutions to the Strominger system on certain complex Lie groups and their quotients. Both flat and non-flat cases are discussed in detail. This paper answers a question proposed by Andreas and Garcia-Fernandez in Comm Math Phys 332(3):13811383, 2014.

We propose an exactly solvable lattice Hamiltonian model of topological phases in 3+1 dimensions, based on a generic finite group G and a 4-cocycle ω over G. We show that our model has topologically protected degenerate ground states and obtain the formula of its ground state degeneracy on the 3-torus. In particular, the ground state spectrum implies the existence of purely three-dimensional looplike quasi-excitations specified by two nontrivial flux indices and one charge index. We also construct other nontrivial topological observables of the model, namely the SL(3,Z) generators as the modular S and T matrices of the ground states, which yield a set of topological quantum numbers classified by ω and quantities derived from ω. Our model fulfills a Hamiltonian extension of the 3+1-dimensional Dijkgraaf-Witten topological gauge theory with a gauge group G. This work is presented to be accessible for a wide range of physicists and mathematicians.

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String theory has had a profound influence on research in Calabi-Yau spaces over the past twenty-five years. We first briefly mention some of the work in Khler Calabi-Yau manifolds that was influenced by the discovery of mirror symmetry in the late 1980s. We then discuss some of the mathematical motivations behind the recent work on non-Khler Calabi-Yau manifolds, which arise in string compactifications with fluxes. After extending mirror symmetry to non-Khler Calabi-Yau manifolds, we show how this leads to new cohomologies and invariants of non-Khler symplectic manifolds.