Heterotic Model Building

by Volker Braun (UPenn)

Friday 1 Aug 2008, 10:00 → 10:30 Europe/Zurich

TH Theory Conference Room (CERN)

I will survey some aspects of geometric compactifications of heterotic strings and their low-energy phenomenology. In particular, I will focus on heterotic "non-standard embeddings". First, I will try to give a brief overview over the role of vector bundles in that construction, and how they can be constructed. Using our "heterotic standard model", I will discuss how the spectrum and Yukawa textures arise. One observation is that not all possible superpotential terms are actually present in such compactifications. For example, I will consider a particular model with one excess Higgs-Higgs conjugate pair. It turns out that flavor-changing neutral currents are greatly suppressed.