Related papers: TASI Lectures on Moonshine
These lectures are intended as an introduction to some of the basic aspects of string solitons, duality and black holes. We begin with a discussion of the role of classical solutions in duality, then focus on string/string duality and…
The lecture note consists of four parts. In the first part, we review a 2+1 dimensional lattice model which realizes emergent supersymmetry at a quantum critical point. The second part is devoted to a phenomenon called fractionalization…
The commencement of monstrous moonshine is a connection between the largest sporadic simple group---the monster---and complex elliptic curves. Here we explain how a closer look at this connection leads, via the Thompson group, to recently…
Answering a question posed by Conway and Norton in their seminal 1979 paper on moonshine, we prove the existence of a graded infinite-dimensional module for the sporadic simple group of O'Nan, for which the McKay--Thompson series are weight…
I first recall the last occasion of meeting the late Professor Yoichiro Nambu in a hospital in Osaka. I then present a brief introduction to the moonshine phenomenon in string theory which is under recent investigations.
By studying 2d string compactifications with half-maximal supersymmetry in a variety of duality frames, we find a natural physical setting for understanding Umbral moonshine. Near points in moduli space with enhanced gauge symmetry, we find…
We explore connections among Monstrous Moonshine, orbifolds, the Kitaev chain and topological modular forms. Symmetric orbifolds of the Monster CFT, together with further orbifolds by subgroups of Monster, are studied and found to satisfy…
We review some aspects of moduli in string theory. We argue that one should focus on {\it approximate moduli spaces}, and that there is evidence that such spaces exist non-perturbatively. We ask what it would mean for string theory to…
These are notes of a series of lectures on mirror symmetry and topological string theory given at the Mathematical Sciences Center at Tsinghua University. The N=2 superconformal algebra, its deformations and its chiral ring are reviewed. A…
A brief discussion is presented assessing the achievements and challenges of string phenomenology: the subfield dedicated to study the potential for string theory to make contact with particle physics and cosmology. Building from the well…
These lectures provide an introduction to perturbative string theory and its construction on spaces with background Ramond flux. Traditional covariant quantization of the string and its connection with vertex operators and conformal…
Superstring theories are very promising theoretically, but the enormous landscape of string vacua and the (likely) very large underlying string scale imply that they may never be tested directly. Nevertheless, concrete constructions…
We consider the situation in which a finite group acts on an infinite-dimensional graded module in such a way that the graded trace functions are weakly holomorphic modular forms. Under a mild hypothesis we completely describe the…
The theory of quadratic forms and class numbers has connections to many classical problems in number theory. Recently, class numbers have appeared in the study of black holes in string theory. We describe this connection and raise questions…
The topic of cosmic strings provides a bridge between the physics of the very small and the very large. They are predicted by some unified theories of particle interactions. If they exist, they may help to explain some of the largest-scale…
In this article, we discuss the relation between Kac-Moody algebras, the monstrous moonshine, Jacobi forms and infinite products. We also review Borcherds' solution of the Moonshine Conjecture and his work of constructing automorphic forms…
These lectures are devoted to introducing some of the basic features of quantum geometry that have been emerging from compactified string theory over the last couple of years. The developments discussed include new geometric features of…
This is a write-up of introductory lectures on black holes in string theory given at TASI-99. Topics discussed include: Black holes, thermodynamics and the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy, the information problem; supergravity actions, conserved…
The Thompson sporadic group admits special relationships to modular forms of two kinds. On the one hand, last century's generalized moonshine for the monster equipped the Thompson group with a module for which the associated McKay-Thompson…
We determine the space of 1-point correlation functions associated with the Moonshine module: they are precisely those modular forms of non-negative integral weight which are holomorphic in the upper half plane, have a pole of order at most…