Special Lagrangian Fibrations I: Topology

Abstract

In 1996, Strominger, Yau and Zaslow made a conjecture about the geometric relationship between two mirror Calabi-Yau manifolds. Roughly put, if X and Y are a mirror pair of such manifolds, then X should possess a special Lagrangian torus fibration $f:X\to B$ such that Y is obtained by dualizing the fibration f. This leaves a huge amount to be done to verify such conjectures. This paper takes a speculative point of view, in that it assumes that a special Lagrangian torus fibration exists on X. We address a number of questions of a topological nature: what is the relationship between the cohomology of X and the cohomology of the dual fibration? what kind of information does the Leray spectral sequence for f contain? what is the relationship between the topological (1,1) couplings of the dual of f and the (1,n-1)-couplings of X in the large complex structure limit? These questions are shown to have nice answers if a key conjecture about the monodromy diffeomorphisms about a large complex structure limit point holds. Roughly put, this conjecture says that monodromy about a large complex structure limit point can be described as a very natural generalization of a Dehn twist for an elliptic curve. Given this conjecture, we show, among other results, that the large complex radius limit of the (1,n-1) couplings on X coincide with the topological (1,1) couplings on Y, and if dim X=3, the Leray filtration and weight filtrations of the mixed Hodge structure coincide, as conjectured by myself and P.M.H. Wilson, and independently by D. Morrison.