BPS States, String Duality, and Nodal Curves on K3

Shing-Tung Yau, Eric Zaslow

Published 1995-12-17Version 1

We describe the counting of BPS states of Type II strings on K3 by relating the supersymmetric cycles of genus $g$ to the number of rational curves with $g$ double points on K3. The generating function for the number of such curves is the left-moving partition function of the bosonic string.