Friday 29 June 2012

String Phenomenology: Day 3

As you will have noticed if you visit this blog, I've not done a very good job of blogging this conference. In order to keep things in order, let me post the only thing I wrote about day 3, so I can move on to the later days!

Mariana Graña discussed the consistency of putative string theory solutions which break supersymmetry via anti-D3-branes in a warped throat (I briefly discussed this in a previous post). She was fairly adamant that this setup is inconsistent, due to induced singularities in the three-form fluxes supporting the throat. The most important approximation she and her collaborators have used seems to be to 'smear' the anti-D3-branes — replace the point-like branes with a continuous charge distribution. This misses one possible resolution of the singularities, which is polarisation of the anti-D3-branes into NS5-branes, but they have arguments to suggest that this won't solve the problem. I doubt that the controversy will be resolved any time soon.

(The latest paper by Graña et al. went on the arXiv the day after this talk.)

Edit: I suppose it's reasonable to also flag my own talk, in which I spoke about my paper from May, which I already mentioned here. I wasn't particularly happy with the talk, although it went okay, and I had a fair-sized audience who seemed to pay attention, so no complaints!

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