A Symposium on Challenges at the Interface of String Phenomenology and Geometry

Virginia Polytechnic Institute And State University, Blacksburg VA

Investigators

Abstract

The two day "Symposium on Challenges at the Interface of String Phenomenology and Geometry" will take place on July 6th and 7th, 2017 as part of the events of the 16th International String Phenomenology 2017 conference that will be held July 3-7, 2017 at Virginia Tech. The goal of the symposium is to promote and facilitate interdisciplinary research in mathematics and physics. The symposium will bring together talented researchers from a diverse range of institutions and backgrounds to address pressing problems at the interface of algebraic/differential geometry, commutative algebra, and string theory. The symposium will consist of one day of invited plenary talks from leading researchers in the field, along with an afternoon of parallel sessions which will invite the contributions of junior and other researchers from around the world. The broader impacts of this event will include the training of graduate students and the increase of interdisciplinary dialog between mathematicians and physicists. Since its inception in 2002 at the University of Oxford, the annual String Phenomenology conference series has grown immensely and become a focal point for researchers working across a wide range of topics in string theory, particle phenomenology, cosmology and mathematics. It provides a forum to bring together active, young researchers from around the world to address the pressing question - Can string theory provide a model of observable physics? However, any path towards an answer to this question must lead to the cutting edge of modern mathematics. In string compactifications the unanswered questions of physics become those of geometry and lead to novel approaches to questions ranging from invariants of singular spaces to birational correspondences and the classification of algebraic varieties, from Mirror Symmetry to the Geometric Langlands program. A symposium to foster such interdsiciplinary dialog between mathematicians and physicists is timely and important. Topics covered by the symposium will include Differential Geometry, Algebraic Geometry, and Computational methods in Commutative Algebra. The conference website is available at http://www.cpe.vt.edu/stringpheno17/index.html.