Theory HEP Seminar

Gauge Theories in the Landscape:
From Deformation Theory to Dark Matter

Jim Halverson

KITP
University of California, Santa Barbara

As the landscape is part and parcel of string theory, understanding it deeply could impact our views of low energy physics or lead the way to a more fundamental understanding of M-theory. In this talk I will focus on gauge theories in the landscape and how they fill out a proper subset of the possible gauge theories in quantum field theory. In particular, I will discuss limits on the representation theory of matter and also string constraints on chiral spectra which go beyond anomaly cancellation. In the former case in F-theory, the deformation theory of elliptically fibered algebraic varieties comes to the fore. In the latter, the possibility of anomaly nucleation places additional constraints on SU(2) gauge theories, but not SU(N>2), which can require the existence of electroweak exotics and provide new theoretical motivation for WIMP dark matter.