Lectures on Warped Compactifications and Stringy Brane Constructions

Abstract

In these lectures, two different aspects of brane world scenarios in 5d gravity or string theory are discussed. In the first two lectures, work on how warped compactifications of 5d gravity theories can change the guise of the hierarchy problem and the cosmological constant problem is reviewed, and a discussion of several issues which remain unclear in this context is provided. In the next two lectures, microscopic constructions in string theory which involve D-branes wrapped on cycles of Calabi-Yau manifolds are described. The focus is on computing the superpotential in the brane worldvolume field theory. Such calculations may be a necessary step towards understanding e.g. supersymmetry breaking and moduli stabilization in stringy realizations of such scenarios, and are of intrinsic interest as probes of the quantum geometry of the Calabi-Yau space.

31 pages, harvmac big. To appear in the proceedings of TASI 1999 and the 2000 Trieste Spring Workshop on Superstrings

References in corpus (11)

• Modulus Stabilization with Bulk Fields
• Quantization of Four-form Fluxes and Dynamical Neutralization of the Cosmological Constant
• The String Dual of a Confining Four-Dimensional Gauge Theory
• Open string instantons and superpotentials
• RG-Flow, Gravity and the Cosmological Constant
• The Cosmological Constant Problem from a Brane-World Perspective
• Supersymmetric Three-cycles and (Super)symmetry Breaking
• Bounds on curved domain walls in 5d gravity
• On Anthropic Solutions of the Cosmological Constant Problem
• Self-tuning in an Outgoing Brane Wave Model
• "Self-tuning" and Conformality