Related papers: Spinor-Vector Duality and the Swampland
Non-compact symmetries of extended 4d supergravities involve duality rotations of vectors and thus are not manifest off-shell invariances in standard "second-order" formulation. To study how such symmetries are realised in the quantum…
This is the author's PhD thesis. Two main sections address various aspects of mirror symmetry for compact Calabi-Yau threefolds and the roles that classically modular varieties play in string theory compactifications. The main results…
This thesis discusses various aspects of duality in quantum field theory and string theory. In the first part we consider duality in topological quantum field theories, concentrating on the Donaldson and Seiberg-Witten theories as (dual)…
The dominance of string theory in the research landscape of quantum gravity physics (despite any direct experimental evidence) can, I think, be justified in a variety of ways. Here I focus on an argument from mathematical fertility, broadly…
We initiate the program of bottom-up derivation of string theory dualities using Swampland principles. In particular, we clarify the relation between Swampland arguments and all the string theory dualities in $d\geq9$ dimensional…
It is widely believed and in part established that exact global symmetries are inconsistent with quantum gravity. One then expects that approximate global symmetries can be quantitatively constrained by quantum gravity or swampland…
We revisit our construction of mirror symmetries for compactifications of Type II superstrings on twisted connected sum $G_2$ manifolds. For a given $G_2$ manifold, we discuss evidence for the existence of mirror symmetries of two kinds:…
If $X$ and $Y$ are a mirror pair of Calabi--Yau threefolds, mirror symmetry should extend to an isomorphism between the type IIA string theory compactified on $X$ and the type IIB string theory compactified on $Y$, with all nonperturbative…
As famously observed by Ooguri and Vafa nearly twenty years ago, scalar field moduli spaces in quantum gravity appear to exhibit various universal features. For instance, they seem to be infinite in diameter, have trivial fundamental group,…
A rich pattern of gauge symmetries is found in the moduli space of heterotic string toroidal compactifications, at fixed points of the T-duality transformations. We analyze this pattern for generic tori, and scrutinize in full detail…
In the context of the Swampland program, black hole attractors have been employed to probe infinite distances in moduli space, where the EFT cutoff goes to zero in Planck units and UV effects become significant. In this paper, we take the…
Generalized global symmetries are a common feature of many quantum field theories decoupled from gravity. By contrast, in quantum gravity / the Swampland program, it is widely expected that all global symmetries are either gauged or broken,…
Recently it has been conjectured that string theory does not allow for dS vacua or dS extrema. To scrutinize such a conjecture, it is important to study concrete string theory compactifications and spell out their assumptions and potential…
An important unsolved problem that affects practically all attempts to connect string theory to cosmology and phenomenology is how to distinguish effective field theories belonging to the string landscape from those that are not consistent…
We construct a class of symplectic non--Kaehler and complex non--Kaehler string theory vacua, extending and providing evidence for an earlier suggestion by Polchinski and Strominger. The class admits a mirror pairing by construction.…
Recently, Kim, Shiu and Vafa proposed general consistency conditions for six dimensional supergravity theories with minimal supersymmetry coming from couplings to strings. We test them in explicit perturbative orientifold models in order to…
The three generation heterotic-string models in the free fermionic formulation are among the most realistic string vacua constructed to date, which motivated their detailed investigation. The classification of free fermion heterotic string…
We present a moduli dependent target space effective field theory action for (truncated) heterotic string toroidal compactifications. When moving continuously along moduli space, the stringy gauge symmetry enhancement-breaking effects,…
The distance conjecture diagnoses viable low-energy effective realisation of consistent theories of quantum gravity by examining their breakdown at infinite distance in their parameter space. At the same time, infinite distance points in…
The construction of mirror symmetry in the heterotic string is reviewed in the context of Calabi-Yau and Landau-Ginzburg compactifications. This framework has the virtue of providing a large subspace of the configuration space of the…