The program consists of four six-hour mini-courses.
Swampland Program
This mini-course by Matilda Delgado will introduce the Swampland Program, a set of criteria and tools to analyze effective field theories that cannot be completed into quantum gravity in the ultraviolet. The latter are distinguished from theories in the "landscape", that is the set of effective field theories coming from string theory.
Homological Mirror Symmetry
This mini-course by Ailsa Keating will give an introduction to Homological Mirror Symmetry (HMS). HMS is a conjecture proposed by Maxim Kontsevich in 1994 which explains mirror symmetry as an equivalence of certain categories of D-branes. The proposal arose from the need to formalize mirror symmetry as a physical duality between topological strings.
Topological Strings
This mini-course by Albrecht Klemm provides an introduction to topological string theory, a topological subsector of type II string theories described by topologically twisted 2d SCFTs coupled to gravity on the worldsheet. Such theories provide exactly computable quantities in string theory and have a wide-range of applications, from supersymmetric gauge theories to pure mathematics.
D-branes in String Compactifications
This mini-course by Johannes Walcher will provide an introduction to string theory and string compactifications, a fundamental tool for the analysis of effective physics in lower dimensions. Non-trivial configurations of D-branes in spacetime play a central role in determining the effective physics.
