Deformations of Calabi–Yau varieties with k-liminal singularities

Abstract

Abstract The goal of this paper is to describe certain nonlinear topological obstructions for the existence of first-order smoothings of mildly singular Calabi–Yau varieties of dimension at least $4$ . For nodal Calabi–Yau threefolds, a necessary and sufficient linear topological condition for the existence of a first-order smoothing was first given in [Fri86]. Subsequently, Rollenske–Thomas [RT09] generalized this picture to nodal Calabi–Yau varieties of odd dimension by finding a necessary nonlinear topological condition for the existence of a first-order smoothing. In a complementary direction, in [FL22a], the linear necessary and sufficient conditions of [Fri86] were extended to Calabi–Yau varieties in every dimension with $1$ -liminal singularities (which are exactly the ordinary double points in dimension $3$ but not in higher dimensions). In this paper, we give a common formulation of all of these previous results by establishing analogues of the nonlinear topological conditions of [RT09] for Calabi–Yau varieties with weighted homogeneous k-liminal hypersurface singularities, a broad class of singularities that includes ordinary double points in odd dimensions.