TH String Theory Seminar

F-theory on singular spaces

by Andres Collinucci (FNRS, ULB, Brussels)

Europe/Zurich
4/3-006 - TH Conference Room (CERN)

4/3-006 - TH Conference Room

CERN

110
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Description
F-theory paints a beautiful picture that relates gauge theories to purely geometric information, whereby the Dynkin diagrams of gauge groups come to life as 2-cycles of internal spaces. A major difficulty arises, though: Such spaces are necessarily singular, and treating them sensibly requires resolving or deforming the singularities. These procedures artificially mutilate the spectrum arising from these theories, and entire families of backgrounds are missed in the analysis. Recently, my collaborator R. Savelli and I have proposed a new strategy that allows one to deal with singular spaces directly. It is based on Eisenbud’s so-called matrix factorisations. It is a remarkably simple concept that has very deep connections to the mathematics of singularities. In this talk, I will review the notions needed to formulate the issues. Then, after introducing our proposal, I will show examples of its applications, such as computations of chiral spectra for bound states of 7-branes.