CAREER: Effective Field Theories from String Compactification

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This award funds the research activities of Professor Jonathan Heckman at the University of North Carolina (UNC)at Chapel Hill. This research will focus on using string theory to understand the workings of Nature at the shortest distance scales. Strings continue to have significant impact on theoretical physics, with interdisciplinary connections ranging from the physics of subatomic particles to pure mathematics. One of the most important open issues is how to connect this framework to experimentally verified theories of subatomic particles. This project aims to use the geometry of extra dimensions predicted by string theory to construct and study theoretical models of relevance both for theories of subatomic particles, and for more formal mathematical applications.The education and outreach efforts of this program will introduce students to the power of geometric methods in theoretical physics. 1) At the postdoc and graduate level, the PI will maintain a collaborative research environment. 2) The PI will develop a course on geometric methods in high energy theory. 3) At the undergraduate level, the PI will advise students on geometric and computational aspects of string theory through the UNC REU program on computational methods in physics held in his department. 4) The PI will work closely with the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center to develop a set of outreach modules aimed at conveying the broad range of energy scales which are actively being investigated by high energy theorists and experimentalists.The technical components of this program will focus on the development of new tools in the study of string compactification at strong coupling, and the resulting low energy effective field theories. Particular emphasis will be placed on compactifications of F-theory. This will entail developing the correspondence between the open string degrees of freedom in the worldvolume theory of intersecting seven-branes, and closed string degrees of freedom captured by elliptically fibered Calabi-Yau manifolds. Additional components will entail the development of specific string-motivated scenarios for physics beyond the Standard Models of particle physics and cosmology. Particle physics applications will include the study of kinetic mixing with a strongly coupled extra sector. Cosmology applications will include the development of inflationary reheating scenarios coupled to concrete stringy particle physics models. This project will also focus on using the geometry of F-theory compactifications as a tool to classify and study superconformal field theories (SCFTs) in diverse dimensions. This will include a classification of 6D SCFTs, the construction of new 4D N = 1 SCFTs from D3-brane probes of singular Calabi-Yau fourfold geometries, and the development of 2D SCFTs with N = (0,2) supersymmetry from compactification on singular elliptically fibered Calabi-Yau fivefolds.