Low energy effective couplings from string theory

by Hans Jockers (Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, Santa Barbara)

Tuesday 9 Feb 2010, 16:45 → 17:45 Europe/Berlin

Universe

String theory provides for a framework to construct explicit models of the fundamental interactions such as the strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions. The framework itself naturally unifies these interactions with gravity in a fully quantum-mechanical way. The theory is finite and well-defined at all distances; in particular it proposes a description of physics at distances shorter than the Planck scale where other theories of quantum gravity break down. A question often asked about string theory is, can we test it? The first task is to arrive at quantitative predictions of string scenarios for particle physics or cosmology. This can be achieved by extracting the low energy effective description for the string scenarios in question. In this talk by employing so-called string dualities I will discuss novel techniques to calculate phenomenologically relevant effective couplings. These effective terms are often of `non-perturbative' nature, and as a consequence their structure encodes also non-trivial information about the underlying quantum geometry of the analyzed string configuration.