Schedule: Fall Term 2025-26

The seminars are taking place on Zoom every second Tuesday at 11 am (all times in US Eastern Time Zone).

The Seminar Series on String Phenomenology is resuming on September 30th, 2025!

October 14th 2025: 

• 11:00: "Laplacians in Various Dimensions and the Swampland", Christian Aoufia, IFT UAM-CSIC

Abstract: The species cutoff is a moduli-dependent quantity signaling the onset of quantum gravitational phenomena, whose form can be determined from higher-derivative corrections within low-energy gravitational EFTs. In this talk, I will point out that these Wilson coefficients are eigenfunctions of an appropriate second-order elliptic operator defined over moduli space in theories with more than four supercharges. I will further discuss on how this fact imposes non-trivial restrictions on the species hull vectors, focusing on the R4-operator in minimal supergravity theories in d = 10, 9, and on the leading R2-term in setups with 8 supercharges in d = 6, 5, 4. A bottom-up rationale for this constraint remains to be understood, and I will conclude by outlining some compelling possibilities.

• 11:30:  "TBA", Jeroen Monnee, U. of Hamburg

Abstract: TBA