Related papers: Topological Strings and Nekrasov's formulas
We consider d=4, N=2 compactifications of heterotic strings with an arbitrary number of Wilson lines. In particular, we focus on known chains of candidate heterotic/type II duals. We give closed expressions for the topological amplitudes…
It was recently shown that the $\mathcal{N}$ = 2 string topological amplitudes in the heterotic weak coupling limit generate a six-dimensional Melvin space, providing a description of the $\Omega$-background in string theory, where string…
The data of a "2D field theory with a closed string compactification" is an equivariant chain level action of a cell decomposition of the union of all moduli spaces of punctured Riemann surfaces with each component compactified as a…
Sinha and Vafa had conjectured that the $SO$ Chern-Simons gauge theory on $S^3$ must be dual to the closed $A$-model topological string on the orientifold of a resolved conifold. Though the Chern-Simons free energy could be rewritten in…
We discuss the moduli-dependent couplings of the higher derivative F-terms $(\Tr W^2)^{h-1}$, where $W$ is the gauge N=1 chiral superfield. They are determined by the genus zero topological partition function $F^{(0,h)}$, on a world-sheet…
I show how one can use lattice methods to calculate various continuum properties of SU(N) gauge theories; in part to explore old ideas that N=3 might be close to N=infinity. I describe calculations of the low-lying `glueball' mass spectrum,…
We obtain Nekrasov-type expressions for the Seiberg-Witten prepotential for the six-dimensional (1,0) supersymmetric E-string theory compactified on T^2 with nontrivial Wilson lines. We consider compactification with four general Wilson…
We propose a formalism inspired by matrix models to compute open and closed topological string amplitudes in the B-model on toric Calabi-Yau manifolds. We find closed expressions for various open string amplitudes beyond the disk, and in…
A detailed study of the charge spectrum of three dimensional Abelian Topological Massive Gauge Theory (TMGT) is given. When this theory is defined on a manifold with two disconnected boundaries there are induced chiral Conformal Field…
It has been proposed recently that topological A-model string amplitudes for toric Calabi-Yau 3-folds in non self-dual graviphoton background can be caluculated by a diagrammatic method that is called the ``refined topological vertex''. We…
In this note we present a brief overview of connections between Chern-Simons theory and topological strings. A prominent role in this link has been played by large N dualities and holography. We demystify this by explaining why the Kahler…
We generalize the conjectured connection between quantum spectral problems and topological strings to many local almost del Pezzo surfaces with arbitrary mass parameters. The conjecture uses perturbative information of the topological…
In arXiv:0905.3629 we described a new class of N=2 topological amplitudes that depends both on vector and hypermultiplet moduli. Here we find that this class is actually a particular case of much more general topological amplitudes which…
In this thesis we probe various interactions between toric geometry and string theory. First, the notion of a top was introduced by Candelas and Font as a useful tool to investigate string dualities. These objects torically encode the local…
We calculate the low-lying glueball spectrum, some string tensions and some properties of topology and the running coupling for SU(N) lattice gauge theories in 3+1 dimensions. We do so for N = 2,3,...12, using lattice simulations with the…
Sinha and Vafa \cite {sinha} had conjectured that the $SO$ Chern-Simons gauge theory on $S^3$ must be dual to the closed $A$-model topological string on the orientifold of a resolved conifold. Though the Chern-Simons free energy could be…
For the gauge couplings, which arise after toroidal compactification of six-dimensional heterotic N=1 string theories from the T^2 torus, we calculate their one-loop corrections. This is performed by considering string amplitudes involving…
These lectures present some topics of string phenomenology and contain two parts. In the first part, I review the possibility of lowering the string scale in the TeV region, that provides a theoretical framework for solving the mass…
We make a precision test of a recently proposed conjecture relating Chern-Simons gauge theory to topological string theory on the resolution of the conifold. First, we develop a systematic procedure to extract string amplitudes from vacuum…
A target space string field theory formulation for open and closed B-model is provided by giving a Batalin-Vilkovisky quantization of the holomorphic Chern-Simons theory with off-shell gravity background. The target space expression for the…