CRITICAL SUPERSTRING VACUA FROM NONCRITICAL MANIFOLDS - A NOVEL FRAMEWORK FOR STRING COMPACTIFICATION AND MIRROR SYMMETRY

A new framework is found for the compactification of supersymmetric string theory. It is shown that the massless spectra of critical string vacua with central charge c = 3D(crit) can be derived from manifolds of complex dimension D(crit) + 2(Q - 1), Q greater-than-or-equal-to 1, whose first Chern class is quantized in a particular way. This new class is more general than that of Calabi-Yau manifolds because it contains spaces corresponding to vacua with no Kahler deformations, i.e., no antigenerations, thus providing mirrors of rigid Calabi-Yau manifolds. The constructions introduced here lead to new insights into the relation between Landau-Ginzburg vacua on the one hand and Calabi-Yau manifolds on the other.