Informal Pizza Seminar

Gauge Theories from String Theory: Geometric Transitions

Anke Knauf

University of Maryland &
Hamburg University

String Theory provides the most promising candidate for a unifying theory of gravity and quantum theory today. It comes at the price of many technical difficulties, like for example ten space-time dimensions (six of which should be compactified) or the existence of five different superstring theories. But it also provides many fascinating tools like dualities between the different string theories. String Theory also provides a natural connection to gauge theories, because it contains D-branes on which open strings can end. This gives rise to gauge theories on those D-branes and by carefully choosing the D-branes and compactification manifolds one can create phenomenologically interesting four-dimensional theories. Geometric Transitions describe a duality between a string theory background with D-branes and a different background without them. This realizes a weak-strong coupling duality for an N=1 supersymmetric SU(N) gauge theory in four dimensions and one can therefore gain insight into non-perturbative phenomena like superpotentials. It will be shown how known geometric transitions can be generalized to a larger class of string backgrounds (i.e. non-Kaehler manifolds) and how to add flavor to the four dimensional gauge theory.