Related papers: The Revival of (0,2) Linear Sigma Models
This review talk focusses on some of the interesting developments in the area of superstring compactification that have occurred in the last couple of years. These include the discovery that ``mirror symmetric" pairs of Calabi--Yau spaces,…
The SO(10) embedding of the Standard Model spectrum is supported by evidence for neutrino masses. This thesis adapts the available formalism to study a class of heterotic M-theory vacua with SO(10) grand unification group. Compactification…
We construct worldsheet descriptions of heterotic flux vacua as the IR limits of N=2 gauge theories. Spacetime torsion is incorporated via a 2d Green-Schwarz mechanism in which a doublet of axions cancels a one-loop gauge anomaly. Manifest…
The homological scaffold leverages persistent homology to construct a topologically sound summary of a weighted network. However, its crucial dependency on the choice of representative cycles hinders the ability to trace back global…
It is shown that the Type IIA superstring compactified on $K3$ has a smooth string soliton with the same zero mode structure as the heterotic string compactified on a four torus, thus providing new evidence for a conjectured exact duality…
We show how identification of absolutely flat directions allows the construction of a new class of compactified string theories with reduced gauge symmetry that may or may not be continuously connected to the original theory. We use this…
We examine recent claims of a large set of flux compactification solutions of string theory. We conclude that the arguments for AdS solutions are plausible. The analysis of meta-stable dS solutions inevitably leads to situations where long…
Many N=1 heterotic string compactifications exhibit physically mysterious singularities at codimension one in the moduli space of vacua. At these singularities, Yukawa couplings of charged fields develop poles as a function of the moduli.…
We study four-dimensional heterotic flux vacua with N=2 spacetime supersymmetry. A worldsheet perspective is used to clarify quantization conditions associated to the fluxes and the constraints these place on the moduli spaces of resulting…
We study the linear sigma model subspace of the moduli space of (0,2) superconformal world-sheet theories obtained by deforming (2,2) theories based on Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces in reflexively plain toric varieties. We describe a set of…
Recently it was proposed that the ten dimensional tachyonic superstring vacua may serve as good starting points for the construction of viable phenomenological models. Such phenomenologically viable models enlarge the space of possible…
One of the central problems of string-phenomenology is to find stable vacua in the four dimensional effective theories which result from compactification. We present an algorithmic method to find all of the vacua of any given…
There has been some confusion concerning the number of $(1,1)$-forms in orbifold compactifications of the heterotic string in numerous publications. In this note we point out the relevance of the underlying torus lattice on this number. We…
In some string theories, e.g. SO(32) heterotic string theory on Calabi-Yau manifolds, a massless field with a tree level potential can acquire a tachyonic mass at the one loop level, forcing us to quantize the theory around a new background…
We construct, as hypersurfaces in toric varieties, Calabi-Yau manifolds corresponding to F-theory vacua dual to E8*E8 heterotic strings compactified to six dimensions on K3 surfaces with non-semisimple gauge backgrounds. These vacua were…
We report on some recent investigations of the structure of the four dimensional gauged supergravity Lagrangian which emerges from flux and Scherk-Schwarz compactifications in higher dimensions. Special attention is given to the gauge…
In this thesis, two aspects of string theory are discussed, tensionless strings and supersymmetric sigma models. The equivalent to a massless particle in string theory is a tensionless string. Even almost 30 years after it was first…
We propose a new approach for deriving the string field equations from a general sigma model on the world sheet. This approach leads to an equation which combines some of the attractive features of both the renormalization group method and…
We consider the possibility that the unification of the electroweak interactions and the strong force arises from string theory, at energies significantly lower than the string scale. As a tool, an effective grand unified field theory in…
The structure of differential equations as they appear in special \K\ geometry of $N=2$ supergravity and $(2,2)$ vacua of the heterotic string is summarized. Their use for computing couplings in the low energy effective Lagrangians of…