String Theory Seminar
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Mon, 11/10/2010 12:00 |
Lotte Hollands (Caltech) |
String Theory Seminar  |
L3 |
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Mon, 18/10/2010 12:00 |
Luis Fernando Alday (Oxford) |
String Theory Seminar |
L3 |
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Mon, 25/10/2010 12:00 |
Ron Reid-Edwards (Oxford) |
String Theory Seminar |
L3 |
| In 2009 Gaiotto and Maldacena demonstrated that the challenge of finding gravitational descriptions of N=2 superconformal field theories could, under certain circumstances, be reduced to a simple two-dimensional electrostatics problem. In this talk I will review their work and discuss recent progress in finding and interpreting such solutions in string and M-theory. | |||
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Mon, 01/11/2010 12:00 |
Rhys Davies (Oxford) |
String Theory Seminar |
L3 |
| Recently, two new Calabi-Yau threefolds have been discovered which have small Hodge numbers, and give rise to three chiral generations of fermions via the so-called 'standard embedding' compactification of the heterotic string.In this talk I will describe how to deform the standard embedding on these manifolds in order to achieve the correct gauge group. I will also describe how to calculate the resulting spectrum and interactions, which is still work in progress. | |||
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Mon, 08/11/2010 12:00 |
Peter West (Kings College London) |
String Theory Seminar |
L3 |
| I will review the conjectured E_{11} symmetry of strings and branes. I will explain how it is natural in the context of this symmetry to introduce a generalised space-time with a corresponding generalised geometry. | |||
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Mon, 15/11/2010 12:00 |
Alan Barr (Oxford) |
String Theory Seminar |
L3 |
| String theory has a vested interest in a particular S1xS1 object found just outside Geneva. The machine in question has been colliding protons at high energy since March this year, and by now the ATLAS and CMS experiments have clocked up more than 10^12 high-energy events. In this seminar I present the status of the accelerator and detectors, highlight the major physics results obtained so far, and discuss the extent to which information from the LHC can inform us about TeV-scale theory. | |||
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Mon, 22/11/2010 12:00 |
Sakura Schafer-Nameki (Kings College London) |
String Theory Seminar |
L3 |
| String theory phenomenology generically suffers from either too much flexibility (and lack of predictability) or from the a high specialization to case by case studies. I will discuss how F-theory GUT model building manages to get around these pitfalls, in particular, I will explain, how to systematically include global string consistency conditions, which are independent of the specific compactification, and which come with the benefit of highly constraining the class of GUT models that can arise from F-theory. | |||
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Mon, 29/11/2010 12:00 |
Maxime Gabella (Oxford) |
String Theory Seminar |
L3 |
| Motivated by the study of general supersymmetric AdS_5 solutions of type IIB supergravity with fluxes, I will define a notion of "generalized Sasaki-Einstein geometry," characterized by a differential system for a triple of symplectic forms in 4d. I will then show that the minimization of the contact volume over a space of generalized Sasakian structures determines the Reeb vector field for such a solution. This is the geometric counterpart of a-maximization in superconformal field theory. This variational procedure will be put to good use by computing BPS quantities for a predicted infinite family of solutions dual to mass-deformed generalized conifolds. | |||
