Surrey

A virtue of the special geometry underlying the string theory moduli space of  Calabi--Yau manifolds is the existence of a canonical choice of moduli space coordinates. In heterotic theories, as much as we would desire it, there is no obvious choice of coordinates and so we should be covariant. I will discuss some issues in doing this.

The horizon conjecture, proved in a case by case basis, states that every supersymmetric smooth horizon admits an sl(2, R) symmetry algebra. However it is unclear how string corrections modify the statement. In this talk I will present the analysis of supersymmetric near-horizon geometries in heterotic supergravity up to two loop order in sigma model perturbation theory, and show the conditions for the horizon to admit an sl(2, R) symmetry algebra. In the second part of the talk, I shall consider the inverse problem of determining all extreme black hole solutions associated to a prescribed near-horizon geometry. I will expand the horizon fields in the radial co-ordinate, the so-called moduli, and show that the moduli must satisfy a system of elliptic PDEs, which implies that the moduli space is finite dimensional.

The talk is based on arXiv:1605.05635 [hep-th] and arXiv:1610.09949 [hep-th].

I am interested in the moduli spaces of heterotic vacua. These are closely related to the moduli spaces of stable holomorphic bundles but in which the base and bundle vary simultaneously, together with additional constraints deriving from string theory. I will first summarise some pre-Brexit results we have derived. These include an explicit Kaehler metric and Kaehler potential for both the moduli space and its first cousin, the matter field space. I will secondly describe new, post-Brexit work in which these results are encased within an elegant geometry, which we call a universal heterotic geometry. Beyond compelling aesthetics, the framework is surprisingly useful giving both a concise derivation of our pre-Brexit results as well as some new results. 

Heterotic vacua, defined with a holomorphic bundle and connection satisfying hermitian Yang-Mills, realise four-dimensional chiral gauge theories. We exploit the rich interplay between four-dimensional physics, supersymmetry and  geometry to construct a natural Kaehler metric for the moduli space, with a shockingly simple Kaehler potential. Along the way, we discover a natural geometric structure for the heterotic moduli.
 

I will present several new  3d N=2 dualities with super-potentials involving monopole operators. Some of the theories that I will discuss describe systems of D3 branes ending on pq-webs. In these cases  3d mirror symmetry is a consequence of S-duality.