Paper detail

An extension of BCOV invariant

Bershadsky, Cecotti, Ooguri and Vafa constructed a real valued invariant for Calabi-Yau manifolds, which is called the BCOV invariant. In this paper, we consider a pair $(X,Y)$, where $X$ is a compact Kaehler manifold and $Y\in\big|K_X^m\big|$ with $m\in\mathbb{Z}\backslash\{0,-1\}$. We extend the BCOV invariant to such pairs. If $m=-2$ and $X$ is a rigid del Pezzo surface, the extended BCOV invariant is equivalent to Yoshikawa's equivariant BCOV invariant. If $m=1$, the extended BCOV invariant is well-behaved under blow-up. It was conjectured that birational Calabi-Yau threefolds have the same BCOV invariant. As an application of our extended BCOV invariant, we show that this conjecture holds for Atiyah flops.