Polynomial deformations and cohomology of Calabi-Yau manifolds

We study the method of polynomial deformations that is used in the physics literature to determine the Hodge numbers of Calabi-Yau manifolds as well as the related Yukawa couplings. We show that the argument generally presented in the literature in support of these computations is seriously misleading, give a correct proof which applies to all the cases we found in the literature, and present examples which show that the method is not universally valid. We present a general analysis which applies to all Calabi-Yau manifolds embedded as complete intersections in products of complex projective spaces, yields sufficient conditions for the validity of the polynomial deformation method, and provides an alternative computation of all the Hodge numbers in many cases in which the polynomial method fails.