Informal Pizza Seminars

A warped/minimal understanding of closed string vacua

Bret Underwood

McGill

Flux compactifications can be an efficient method to stabilize closed string moduli, but their 4-dimensional effective theories are invalid for the generic case of non-trivial warping. We will discuss how the non-trivial warping makes the identification of the 10-dimensional fluctuations corresponding to the 4-dimensional fields particularly interesting, using the “breathing mode” as an example. We will also discuss the difficulty in obtaining metastable de-Sitter vacua with pure fluxes, outline the minimal ingredients necessary (but perhaps not sufficient) to obtain metastable dS vacua, and present a minimal simple metastable de-Sitter solution with no non-perturbative or higher-order effects.