Events

Date: 4 June 2026   Time: 14:00 - 15:00

Location: Room 610, G.O. Jones Building

Title: Asymmetric Orbifolds, Rank Reduction and Heterotic Islands

Abstract: Exploring unknown regions of the moduli space of 2-dimensional conformal field theories plays an important role in understanding properties of theories of quantum gravity. In this talk I will discuss a family of world-sheet conformal field theories, asymmetric orbifolds, that describe some of these unexplored loci in the moduli space. I will focus on the application of asymmetric orbifolds to toroidal compactifications of heterotic string theory, and will consider theories in 6 and 4 dimensions with 16 supercharges and reduced rank. I will present a novel formalism, based on the Leech lattice, to construct 'islands' without vector multiplets.