Related papers: Prolegomena to the Bestiary
This is the written version of a short talk given at the University of Leipzig in December 1998. It reviews some general aspects of string theory from the viewpoint of the search for an unifying theory. Here, special emphasis lies on the…
I give a short commentary on a seminal article by T W B Kibble in 1976, "Topology of cosmic domains and strings".
These lecture notes are an introduction to toric geometry. Particular focus is put on the description of toric local Calabi-Yau varieties, such as needed in applications to the AdS/CFT correspondence in string theory. The point of view…
The best candidate for a fundamental unified theory of all physical phenomena is no longer ten-dimensional superstring theory but rather eleven-dimensional {\it M-theory}. In the words of Fields medalist Edward Witten, ``M stands for…
While Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces in toric ambient spaces provide a huge number of examples, theoretical considerations as well as applications to string phenomenology often suggest a broader perspective. With even the question of finiteness…
Topological strings on Calabi--Yau manifolds are known to undergo phase transitions at small distances. We study this issue in the case of perturbative topological strings on local Calabi--Yau threefolds given by a bundle over a two-sphere.…
The dynamics of extended objects, such as strings and membranes, has attracted more attention in the past decades since the fundamental objects introduced in high-energy physics are no longer pointlike. Their motion is generally quite…
We add to the mounting evidence that the topological B model's normalized holomorphic three-form has integral periods by demonstrating that otherwise the B2-brane partition function is ill-defined. The resulting Calabi-Yau manifolds are…
We give an introduction to mirror symmetry of strings on Calabi-Yau manifolds with an emphasis on its applications e.g. for the computation of Yukawa couplings. We introduce all necessary concepts and tools such as the basics of toric…
These 1992 lectures notes present a powerful formalism mostly developed in the 1980s by Borderies, Goldreich and Tremaine to address planetary ring dynamical issues. These notes make a special emphasis on ring microphysics, quantified with…
The most impressively prolific exploration of superstring models (aiming for our physical reality) has been focused on worldsheet-supersymmetric gauged linear sigma models and the closely associated complex-algebraic toric geometry. Mirror…
Grand Unification of all forces has been a well motivated paradigm for particle physics. This subject has been recently revisited in the context of string theory, leading to a geometric reformulation of the idea of unification of forces.…
The text contains introduction and preliminary definitions and results to my talk on category theory description of supersymmetries and integrability in string theory. In the talk I plan to present homological and homotopical algebra…
We study geometric transitions for topological strings on compact Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces in toric varieties. Large N duality predicts an equivalence between topological open and closed string theories connected by an extremal transition.…
A brief overview is presented of the progress made during the past few years on the general structure of local models of particle physics from string theory including: moduli stabilisation, supersymmetry breaking, global embedding in…
This paper investigates the algebraic structure that exists on perturbative BPS-states in the superstring, compactified on the product of a circle and a Calabi-Yau fourfold. This structure was defined in a recent article by Harvey and…
These are lecture notes for two lectures delivered at the Les Houches workshop on Number Theory, Physics, and Geometry, March 2003. They review two examples of interesting interactions between number theory and string compactification, and…
A few years ago, Fang, Lu and Yoshikawa conjectured that a certain string-theoretic invariant of Calabi-Yau threefolds is a birational invariant. We prove a weak form of this conjecture.
In this article we prove that there exists an explicit bijection between nice $d$-pre-Calabi-Yau algebras and $d$-double Poisson differential graded algebras, where $d \in \mathbb{Z}$, extending a result proved by N. Iyudu and M.…
In this paper we study string compactifications on Deligne-Mumford stacks. The basic idea is that all such stacks have presentations to which one can associate gauged sigma models, where the group gauged need be neither finite nor…