SCIENTIFIC PROGRAMS AND ACTIVITIES

March 28, 2024

High Energy Physics Seminars 2007-08
held at the Fields Institute

Overview
High-energy physics (HEP) at the University of Toronto is a comprehensive program involving experimentalists and theorists. Theoretical HEP seminar topics include string theory, early universe cosmology, physics beyond the standard model, and particle phenomenology, while experimental HEP seminar topics include both particle and astrophysics experiment. Experimentalists also hold weekly collaboration meetings, while theorists also hold a weekly internal journal club.

Organizer: Erich Poppitz
String theory: Mondays at 12:10 Fields Institute Library
For dates see below

Date

Speaker

Mar. 10/08
12:10 p.m.
Michael Schulz, University of Pennsylvania
String Junctions, Abelian Fibrations and Flux/Geometry Duality.

Jan 28/08
12:10 p.m.
Fields Institute,
Room 230

Yang-Hui He, Merton College, Oxford
Triadophilia: a special corner of the landscape
It is well known that there are a great many apparently consistent vacua of string theory. We draw attention to the fact that there appear to be very few Calabi--Yau manifolds with the Hodge numbers h^{11} and h^{21} both small. Of these, the case (h^{11}, h^{21})=(3,3) corresponds to a manifold on which a three generation heterotic model has recently been constructed. We point out also that there is a very close relation between this manifold and several familiar manifolds including the `three-generation' manifolds with \chi=-6 that were found by Tian and Yau, and by Schimmrigk, during early investigations. It is an intriguing possibility that we may live in a naturally defined corner of the landscape. The location of these three generation models with respect to a corner of the landscape is so striking that we are led to consider the possibility of transitions between heterotic vacua. The possibility of these transitions, that we here refer to as transgressions, is an old idea that goes back to Witten. Here we apply this idea to connect three generation vacua on different Calabi-Yau manifolds.
Jan 8/08
2:00 p.m.
Josh Guffin (Urbana-Champaign)
Deformed Quantum Cohomology and (0,2) Mirror Symmetry
Nov. 26/07
12:10 p.m.
Daniel Jafferis, Rutgers University
Fragmenting 4-branes and q-deformed Yang-Mills
Nov. 22/07
12:10 p.m.*
Boris Pioline, Université Paris VI et VII
"Quantum attractor flows and black hole partition functions"
*Note: Unusual Time
Nov. 5/07
12:10 p.m.
Thomas Levi, New York University
"Black Hole Microstates:From D-branes to Foam"