Attractors and Arithmetic

Abstract

We consider attractor varieties arising in the construction of dyonic black holes in Calabi-Yau compactifications of IIB string theory. We show that the attractor varieties are constructed from products of elliptic curves with complex multiplication for $\mathcal{N}=4,8$ compactifications. The heterotic dual theories are related to rational conformal field theories. The emergence of curves with complex multiplication suggests many interesting connections between arithmetic and string theory. This paper is a brief overview of a longer companion paper entitled ``Arithmetic and Attractors,'' hep-th/9807087.