HETFLUXPHENO · Phenomenological Aspects of Heterotic String Compactifications with Background Fluxes

The purpose of this proposal is to conduct research in one of the leading candidate fields for theories beyond the standard model of particle physics, namely string theory. Concretely, in the context of heterotic string compactifications with background fluxes the project proposes to study the influence of fluxes and moduli stabilisation on the phenomenological properties of such models. The project will mainly be concerned with four-dimensional theories obtained from compactification of the heterotic strings on manifolds with SU(3) structure. In a first stage supersymmetric as well as non-supersymmetric vacua of these theories will be studied. At the center will be the issue of moduli stabilisation and their consequences for the observable part of the theory. A special emphasis will be put on computing the couplings and masses for the charged and moduli fields and compare them with the existing experimental bounds. Moreover the patterns for these quantities which may be observed at the LHC will be analysed. Also issues like supersymmetry breaking and inflation in these models will be addressed. In a second stage the project will study extensions of the models considered so far. A first possibility will be to understand in full generality the fluxes which can be turned on in both the weakly and strongly coupled heterotic string compactifications and the superpotentials for moduli and matter fields generated in this way. Then the moduli stabilisation analysis will be redone for these more general models. As a second extension, models which have a realistic observable sector will be considered. The problems of moduli stabilisation as well as computing masses and couplings for these models will be addressed.