String Phenomenology 2017

这笔赠款在弗吉尼亚理工学院和州立大学詹姆斯·格雷教授的指导下，为将于2017年7月3日至7日在美国弗吉尼亚州布莱克斯堡弗吉尼亚理工大学举行的会议《弦现象2017：第十六届弦现象年会》提供部分支持。自2002年在牛津大学创办以来，一年一度的弦现象学会议已经成为弦现象学子领域的旗舰年度会议。弦理论旨在描述物质的基本组成部分的性质及其在最高能量下的相互作用，而弦现象学旨在发展弦理论的思想与更传统的粒子物理、天体物理学和宇宙学的思想之间的联系。因此，这些会议吸引了代表不同国际社会的物理学家和数学家，并提供了一个讨论和介绍这一令人兴奋的跨学科领域的最新发展和挑战的场所。鉴于日内瓦欧洲核子研究中心大型强子对撞机、激光干涉仪引力波天文台和暗能量调查最近的重要实验结果，以及来自数学文献的大量新结果，这一系列会议的第十六次迭代将特别重要和及时。因此，对这一系列会议的支持符合美国的国家利益，因为它促进了美国的基础科学。这笔赠款预计也将产生重大的更广泛的影响。这些会议汇集了来自不同机构和背景的有才华的研究人员，并特别努力纳入初级研究人员和代表性不足群体成员的工作。

This grant, under the direction of Professor James Gray at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, provides partial support for the conference "String Phenomenology 2017: The Sixteenth Annual Meeting on String Phenomenology", which will be held at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA on July 3rd-7th, 2017. Since their inception at the University of Oxford in 2002, the annual String Phenomenology conferences have become the flagship annual meeting for the subfield of string phenomenology. String theory aims to describe the nature of the fundamental building blocks of matter and their interactions at the very highest energies, and string phenomenology aims to develop connections between the ideas of string theory and those of more traditional particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology. As such, these conferences attract physicists and mathematicians representing a diverse international community and provide a venue in which they can discuss and present recent developments and challenges in this exciting interdisciplinary field. The sixteenth iteration of this conference series will be particularly important and timely, given recent important experimental results from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), and from the Dark Energy Survey (DES), as well as a plethora of new results from the mathematical literature. As such, support for this series of meetings serves the national interest by promoting basic science in the United States. This grant is also envisioned to have significant broader impacts. These conferences bring together talented researchers from a diverse range of institutions and backgrounds, and special effort is made to incorporate the work of junior researchers and members of under-represented groups.