Workshop Home

Partially supported by the DOE Office of Science (Office of High Energy Physics).

For string theory to make contact with our four dimensional world it is necessary to compactify the theory to four space-time dimensions. The resulting theory has moduli fields, quantities that arise to describe the sizes, shapes, and orientations of the curled up small region. The moduli interact giving a potential that can be minimized, thus stabilizing the moduli. Once that is done, the resulting theory is generically a 4D supergravity quantum field theory. This provides an exciting framework to address major outstanding issues in particle physics and cosmology. Because string theory provides a framework that relates answers to different issues, it is a powerful way to unify results, and a way to make progress in parallel with emerging data from LHC and dark matter experiments.

There has been great progress in these directions in recent years. Examples exist of compactified theories with stablilized moduli in unique de Sitter vacua, with supersymmetry breaking, solutions to the hierarchy problem and TeV physics emerging, solutions to flavor weak and strong CP problems, a prediction of the Higgs boson mass that turned out to be correct, incorporation of μ into the theory so μ and tan β are no longer free parameters, and so on. The world-wide string phenomenology community has been meeting for a decade annually. The recent conclusion of the NSF "String Vacuum Project" funding means that additional support for activity in this field is crucially needed to sustain progress.

The Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics will hold a workshop on String/M-theory compactifications and moduli stabilization, March 4-7, 2015. Talks and discussion should be aimed toward approaches and methods to make actual predictions for observables, and descriptions of predictions.

Talks will normally be 40 minutes, and shorter ones can be requested. People are welcome to participate without giving talks. Please let us know by February 16, 2015 if you will participate. We have a limited amount of funding for accommodations, and a very limited amount for travel. If you would like to request support please send a request to Karen (below). Priority will be given to advanced grad students and postdocs, and people with very limited funding. The deadline for requesting support is January 27, 2015. Please note that if we are reimbursing your housing, we must make your reservation in order to avoid the room taxes.