Annual Report 2005 - Fields Institute - University of Toronto

Participants
Mariana Grana (Ecole Normale Supérieure-Paris)
Hitchin functionals in supergravity
Sergei Gukov (Harvard)
Heterotic moduli stabilization with fractional Chern-Simons
invariants
Ruben Minasian (École Polytechnique)
On mirror symmetry with fluxes and branes
Michael Schulz (Caltech)
Mapping flux to geometry
Gary Shiu (Wisconsin & Perimeter Inst.)
Building chiral flux vacua
Alessandro Tomasiello (Stanford)
Towards generalized complex mirror symmetry
Workshop on String Phenomenology
March 28–April 1, 2005
Held at Perimeter Institute
Organizers: Jan Louis (Hamburg), Robert Myers (Perimeter)
and Gary Shiu (Wisconsin)
This workshop was mounted jointly by the Fields Institute
and Perimeter Institute (in Waterloo). It ran at Perimeter,
coming immediately after the closely related Fields workshop
on N=1 Compactifications.
String phenomenology has emerged as a research area at the
rich interdisciplinary boundaries of string theory, particle
physics, and cosmology. Although research in string phenomenology
is motivated by physical questions, progress
T h e m a t i c P r o g r a m s
often comes from connections to more formal and mathematical
aspects of string theory. This meeting brought
together an international array of over 80 researchers from
the United States, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, England,
Japan and, of course, Canada, representing interest in all
aspects of this field.
Traditionally string phenomenology has focused on the
issue of how the physics of elementary particles and forces,
as observed in laboratory experiments, can arise from
string theory. Hence the workshop included a number of
technical talks assessing various proposals for how various
features of the so-called Standard Model might arise in
stringy constructions. In this domain, an extremely important
question is how to recognize various signatures in the
new collider experiments which will be run over the next
few years. In particular, the largest such experiment, called
the “Large Hadron Collider” (LHC), will turn on at the
CERN laboratory in Geneva in 2007. Hence the workshop
organizers called upon Gordy Kane (Michigan) to organize
an “LHC Stretching Exercise”, in which he presented
mock experimental data and challenged participants to
determine the underlying stringy model. It is expected that
such warm-up exercises will become a common feature for
string phenomenology meetings as 2007 approaches.
A particularly exciting and active area of string phenomenology
in recent years has been addressing questions at the
interface between cosmology and string theory. Cosmology
has entered an extraordinary era where experimental data
has fixed the basic parameters describing the evolution of
the universe and points towards the existence of an inflationary
phase of accelerated expansion in its very earliest
stages. At the same time, string theory has seen remarkable
progress in the past few years in moving from a stage where
people questioned the compatibility of string theory with
cosmological observations to one where people regularly
propose detailed models and compare their predictions
with the experimental data. Hence a good proportion of the
workshop was devoted to string cosmology with a variety
of talks on topics such as cosmic superstrings, string signatures
in the cosmic microwave background and even the
wave-function of the universe.
One of the most interesting aspects of superstring
cosmology has been the recent realization that rather
than “providing a unique answer”, string theory may
consistently describe a huge number of different kinds
of universes. This broad array of different possible solutions
is known as “the string theory landscape”. At the
Fields Institute 2005 ANNUAL REPORT 26