On The Geometry of Heterotic String Compactifications

by Prof. Xenia de la Ossa (Oxford University)

Thursday 17 Mar 2011, 16:00 → 17:00 Asia/Kolkata

A-304 (Colaba Campus)

I will discuss the properties of heterotic string compactifications on manifolds which are complex and have vanishing first Chern class, but which are not Kahler. I will describe how these are connected to the more traditional compactifications on Calabi-Yau manifolds through flops and conifold transitions. Time permitting, I will discuss some of open problems, in particular the understanding of the moduli space of these compactifications and the massless spectrum of the effective 4 dimensional supersymmetric field theory.