Canonical Coordinates in Toric Degenerations

Abstract

We prove that the mirror map is trivial for the canonical formal families of Calabi-Yau varieties constructed by Gross and the second author. In other words, the natural coordinate in a canonical Calabi-Yau family is a canonical coordinate in the sense of Hodge theory. This implies that the higher weight periods directly carry enumerative information with no further gauging necessary as opposed to the classical case. A side result is that the canonical formal families lift to analytic families. We compute the relevant period integrals explicitly. The cycles to integrate over are constructed from tropical 1-cycles in the intersection complex of the degenerate Calabi-Yau.