Related papers: The String Geometry Behind Topological Amplitudes
These lectures trace the origin of string theory as a theory of hadronic interactions (predating QCD itself) to the present ideas on how the QCD string may arise in Superstring theory in a suitably deformed background metric. The…
We study four dimensional field theory from the low-energy effective theory of Type I, II or heterotic string theories. Chiral fermions in four dimensions are obtained by several mechanisms. Especially, the background flux is one of the…
It is shown that two dimensional (2d) topological gravity in the conformal gauge has a larger symmetry than has been hitherto recognized; in the formulation of Labastida, Pernici and Witten it contains a twisted ``small'' N=4 superconformal…
We review recent simulations of the formation of a particular class of non-topological defects known as semilocal strings during a phase transition. Semilocal strings have properties that are intermediate between topological cosmic strings…
We generate a class of string backgrounds by a sequence of TsT transformations of the NS1-NS5 system that we argue are holographically dual to states in a single-trace $T\bar T + J\bar T + T\bar J$-deformed CFT$_2$. The new string…
We give a brief overview of the string landscape and techniques used to construct string compactifications. We then explain how this motivates the notion of the swampland and review a number of conjectures that attempt to characterize…
We study various properties of a nonperturbative partition function which can be associated to any spectral curve. When the spectral curve arises from a matrix model, this nonperturbative partition function is given by a sum of matrix…
We study heterotic ground states in which supersymmetry is broken by coupling the momentum and winding charges of two large extra dimensions to the R-charges of the supersymmetry generators. The large dimensions give rise to towers of heavy…
We study the equivariant generalization of topological strings on toric manifolds, focusing in particular on defining the contributions of constant maps in the genus expansion of the partition function. This approach regularizes the…
Superstrings and topological strings with supermanifolds as target space play a central role in the recent developments in string theory. Nevertheless the rules for higher-genus computations are still unclear or guessed in analogy with…
In this paper we describe the heterotic dual of the type IIB theory compactified to four dimensions on a toroidal orientifold in the presence of fluxes. The type IIB background is most easily described in terms of an M-theory…
The ten dimensional heterotic string effective action with graviton, dilaton and antisymmetric tensor fields is dimensionally reduced to two spacetime dimensions. The resulting theory, with some constraints on backgrounds, admits infinite…
This review provides an introduction to non-geometric backgrounds in string theory. Starting from a discussion of T-duality, geometric and non-geometric torus-fibrations are reviewed, generalised geometry and its relation to non-geometric…
We reconsider the issue of large-volume compactifications of the heterotic string in light of the recent discoveries about strongly-coupled string theories. Our conclusion remains firmly negative with respect to classical compactifications…
We review recent developments in the construction of heterotic and type II string field theories and their various applications. These include systematic procedures for determining the shifts in the vacuum expectation values of fields under…
It has been conjectured that Little String Theories in six dimensions are holographic to critical string theory in a linear dilaton background. We test this conjecture for theories arising on the worldvolume of heterotic fivebranes. We…
Six dimensional $\mathcal{N}=(1,0)$ supergravity features BPS strings whose properties encode highly nontrivial information about the parent 6d theory. We focus on a distinguished set of theories whose string charge lattice is…
We describe two major string topology operations, the Chas-Sullivan product and the Goresky-Hingston coproduct, from geometric and algebraic perspectives. The geometric construction uses Thom-Pontrjagin intersection theory while the…
We give evidence that the all genus amplitudes of topological string theory on compact elliptically fibered Calabi-Yau manifolds can be written in terms of meromorphic Jacobi forms whose weight grows linearly and whose index grows…
We study oscillating string solutions in the Klebanov-Witten and its non-Abelian T-dual background dualised along an SU(2) isometry. We find the string energy as the function of oscillation number and angular momentum. We show that for a…