Physical Society Colloquium

Strings and Particle Phenomenology

Cumrun Vafa

Department of Physics
Harvard University

Recent progress in string theory has led to a vast landscape of consistent vacua for the theory. In this talk I will discuss how the principle of decoupling of quantum gravity from particle physics leads to a very narrow set of possibilities in this landscape. This rigid framework leads to specific predictions for particle physics, including a quantitative explanation of mass hierarchies for quarks and leptons. Moreover this approach to particle phenomenology leads to specific predictions for new physics at the LHC.