Dualities and the Compactifiability of Moduli Space

by Matilda Delgado (Harvard/LMU Munich)

Monday 25 Nov 2024, 13:00 → 15:00 Europe/Berlin

We introduce the notion of compactifiability for the moduli space of massless fields as the condition that their volume is finite or grows no faster than Euclidean space.  We argue compactifiability generically implies the existence of non-trivial dualities by providing a large body of evidence from string theory. Moreover, we connect compactifiability to the condition that the spectrum of objects charged under the duality group transform in a semisimple representation. Finally we argue that compactifiability (at least in supersymmetric cases) can be explained by the finiteness of the number of massless states upon compactification to 2 dimensions. Based on work soon to appear with D. v.d.Heisteeg, S. Raman, E. Torres, C. Vafa and K. Xu.