String Phenomenology 2017

Virginia Polytechnic Institute And State University, Blacksburg VA

Investigators

Abstract

This grant, under the direction of Professor James Gray at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, provides partial support for the conference "String Phenomenology 2017: The Sixteenth Annual Meeting on String Phenomenology", which will be held at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA on July 3rd-7th, 2017. Since their inception at the University of Oxford in 2002, the annual String Phenomenology conferences have become the flagship annual meeting for the subfield of string phenomenology. String theory aims to describe the nature of the fundamental building blocks of matter and their interactions at the very highest energies, and string phenomenology aims to develop connections between the ideas of string theory and those of more traditional particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology. As such, these conferences attract physicists and mathematicians representing a diverse international community and provide a venue in which they can discuss and present recent developments and challenges in this exciting interdisciplinary field. The sixteenth iteration of this conference series will be particularly important and timely, given recent important experimental results from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), and from the Dark Energy Survey (DES), as well as a plethora of new results from the mathematical literature. As such, support for this series of meetings serves the national interest by promoting basic science in the United States. This grant is also envisioned to have significant broader impacts. These conferences bring together talented researchers from a diverse range of institutions and backgrounds, and special effort is made to incorporate the work of junior researchers and members of under-represented groups.