Lucas Leung (Oxford U.) - Heterotic Flux Vacua with Small W0

by Lucas Leung (Oxford University)

Wednesday 18 Mar 2026, 15:00 → 16:00 Europe/Stockholm

92110 (Ångströmlaboratoriet)

String compactifications naturally lead to a large number of massless scalar moduli fields in the low-energy effective theory which must be stabilised in any serious attempts of reproducing realistic string models of particle physics. Whilst landscapes of heterotic string models that reproduce the standard model spectrum have been well studied, heterotic moduli stabilisation remains much less developed than analogous mechanisms in other string theories. In this talk I will aim to provide a review of moduli stabilisation in string theory and highlight the challenges in heterotic theories compared to its analogous Type IIB case. I will then address the size of the flux superpotential W0 in heterotic theories, and provide no-go theorems and explicit examples for small-W0 vacua in different regions of complex structure moduli space. This talk is based on a forthcoming publication with Andrei Constantin, Andre Lukas and Burt Ovrut.