A Quick Course on String Compactification

An informal lectures at Hongo, 2018 autumn

Objective: The primary target audience was the 1st-year graduate students at U. Tokyo Physics Major Course, who have finished reading Polchinski's textbook until Chapter 11 (Het string). The purpose of this quick course is to provide a broad-brush picture of how string compactification is related to the description of elementary particle physics, so students who will work in pheno or main stream string theory in their near future can have a rough picture of how the other side is related to their field of expertise; this course is not designed for students who will soon start working on stringphenomenology.

Day 1: September 22 (Sat): 13:00--17:30, Hongo, Rm 913.

Section 1. Compactification in the Language of 10D SUGRA     note-01
    1.1 Bottom-up Motivations for Low-energy Supersymmetry
    1.2 Special Holonomy Manifolds and Partial Supersymmetry Breaking
    1.3 Low-energy Spectrum of Closed String
    1.4 D-brane


Day 2: September 25 (Tue): 13:00--17:30, Hongo, Rm 913.

Section 2. From Pheno Perspectives (inc. Strind Duality)     note-02
    2.1 Doublet-triplet splitting problem in Supersymmetric GUT
    2.2 String Duality and D=4 N=1 Landscape of Vacua
    2.3 Axion in String Compactification
    2.4 Flux Compactification and Complex Structure Moduli Stabilization
    2.5 Inflation and Volume Moduli Stabilization

Section 3. Theoretical Miscellany     note-03
    3.1 Kahler (SUSY) vs non-Kahler (non-SUSY), and Higher-order Alpha' Correction
    3.2 Non-geometric Phases
    3.3 Fractional Branes
    3.4 Topics Not Included in This Quick Course


References are cited in the lecture notes.


updated on September 30, 2018.