Abstract:

In this talk, upon discussing aspects of the string landscape, I will motivate and introduce a program for birationally characterizing the infinite-distance degenerations of compact elliptic Calabi-Yau varieties, described in a Weierstrass form. Then, I will report on our main results for elliptic K3 surfaces, which conform with what is known about Kulikov models. If time permits, a recent attempt to generalize the results to 3-dimensional Calabi-Yau varieties will also be discussed.