0. INTRODUCTION
I am interested in the interplay between Geometry and Physics, particularly Algebraic Geometry and High Energy Physics. My view is that mathematics is more than a analytical tool for solving problems; it is a guide to the fundamental structures and principles of the natural world. I am currently working on two research projects in this area:
I developed some familiarity with these objects through past work related to (II) [2,4] which applied algebraic geometry to build a heterotic string theory model. In (I) a more fundamental connection between Mathematics and Physics is explored (Geometric Langlands on the Math side and a duality between Field Theories on the Physics side).
I BACKGROUND
Geometric Langlands: The Geometric Langlands Conjecture (GLC) can be viewed as a non-abelian extension of Class Field Theory and has recently generated much interest in the physics community where it is viewed as an isomorphism between different 4-dimensional conformal topological field theories [22]. In physics this isomorphism is called ``electric-magnetic'' duality and should be viewed as a non-commutative generalization of electric-magnetic duality in Maxwell's equations. In [22], a quantum field theoretical argument for the conjecture is given, and a claim is made that important objects in the Geometric Langlands program, such as Hecke eigensheaves, Fourier-Mukai transforms, and
-modules, arise naturally from the physics, giving new meaning and interpretation to these mathematical constructions. Mathematically GLC will associate to a
-local system on a curve C a particular sheaf called a Hecke eigensheaf on the moduli space
of principal
-bundles.
On the math side some progress has been made on the ``classical limit'' of this quantum conjecture [14]. This limit describes a duality between Hitchin's integrable systems for a reductive group and for its Langlands dual group. In [14], the authors prove the duality for a Zariski open set in the Hitchin base parameterizing the non-singular spectral covers. We hope to pass from the full GLC through these classical limit results and then lift back to GLC in the case of a specific example where all of the relevant quantities can be calculated directly.
Heterotic String Theory: The standard model of particle physics is a theory that includes three of the four fundamental physical forces (electromagnetism, weak force and the strong force), all of the detected elementary particles and has been verified experimentally to astounding precision. It is however, an incomplete theory in that it leaves off one of the fundamental forces (gravity), does not explain the apparent unification of the fundamental forces at high energies and has no explanation for other parameters appearing in the theory such as particle mass. String Theory is an attempt to fix these deficits.
Two decades ago it was shown that a physically realistic string theory can be realized with a Calabi-Yau threefold as the compact portion of space-time [18]. On this Calabi-Yau a Heterotic String theory compactification is specified by giving a vector bundle with special properties determined by physics. In the last decade, many examples of Calabi-Yau manifolds have been produced, but until recently [8] there were no examples of a Heterotic String with a phenomenologically correct particle spectrum.
Key ingredients in the construction of potential models are applications of powerful results from algebraic geometry including new examples of non-simply connected Calabi-Yaus, Fourier-Mukai transforms and the spectral construction, computational techniques for calculating vector bundle cohomology, the Serre construction for vector bundles among others.
New experimental results out of LHC may potentially verify some of the predictions of string theory including perhaps some signs of supersymmetry and the discovery of the Higgs particle. However more string theory models with the phenomenologically correct low energy particle spectrum are needed if string theory is to be a grand unified theory for the standard model.
We propose to search several promising and newly discovered families of non-simply connected Calabi-Yau for such constructions. For physics, large fundamental groups give more flexibility when breaking the grand unified group to the standard model group. Some of the examples we propose to examine have some of the largest known fundamental groups of all Calabi-Yau.
II GEOMETRIC LANGLANDS AND QUANTUM FIELD THEORY
The simplest case of GLC is the well known result that a flat line bundle on C extends uniquely to a bundle on
. GLC states that we should to attach to every rank 1 local system
on
(a line bundle with flat connection) a certain sheaf called a Hecke eigensheaf of
on
. Let
be the homomorphism associated to
. Then
factors through the abelianization of
,
. By Poincaré duality we have
which is just
. Hence we get a homomorphism
. This gives a line bundle on
that can be extended to all of
(see for example [15]).
To generalize this idea to the full GLC we will need to take G to be any complex reductive group and T a maximal torus. There is a notion of Langlands duality for groups interchanging the characters and cocharaters of the groups. Two groups,
and
are Langlands Dual if
in which case we write
.
There is a moduli space
classifying quadruples
where
and
are
-bundles and
is a isomorphism over
of
and
. Viewing the triple
we have the natural induced projections on
:
and
with
and
. To the highest weight
of a finite dimensional irreducible representation of
we can associate a perverse sheave
. This gives a functor from the derived category of perverse sheaves on
to those on
called a Hecke functor via the integral transform
First recall that a Higgs
-bundle is
-principal bundle V along with a section
of
, where
is adjoint bundle associated to
. There is a moduli stack of Higgs G-bundles denoted
. The classical limit is found by specializing both sides of the GLC [14].
What we would like to work out the classical Langlands conjecture for a well chosen example and try to deform the result back to the full GLC.
Proposal:
I am working out the correspondence in the case of a hyperelliptic curve of any genus with no marked points with
. There we should be able to work out explicit descriptions of the relevant moduli spaces. In particular we have an explicit description of the moduli space
as the intersection of two quadrics in
[11].
We start on the left hand side of GLC and specialize to the classical case. In the classical case we attempt to work out explicitly the Hecke correspondences in a purely algebraic manner (one of the deficits of the constructions in [14] are their use of non-algebraic constructions in the proof). Knowing the Hecke correspondences we will try to lift to right hand side of the statement of GLC by showing explicit deformation extension order by order in the deformation parameter to move away from the specialized fiber (a similar approach was attempted by Arinkin in the case of
with some marked points).
Doing this process we hope to gain insight into the connection between the classical case and the full GLC. The hope would be to show that one could do this in general, thereby proving GLC. A different transcendental approach is being pursued by Donagi and Pantev using recent advances in Non Abelian Hodge Theory (see for example [24]-[29]) and it will be interesting to compare these two approaches for the hyperelliptic
case.
III ALGEBRAIC GEOMETRY AND HETEROTIC STRING THEORY
After some simplifications [13] to define a Heterotic theory we get a well defined problem in algebraic geometry. The task is to find a Calabi-Yau threefold X with Kähler form
and
a
or
vector bundle on X with
or
. The bundle
should be Mumford polystable with respect to
and have chern classes satisfying
,
{class of effective curve}
and
. These numerical requirements are quite rigid, and the search for bundles satisfying the constraints typically requires detailed analysis of the particular threefold in question using the techniques described above.
Spectral Approach to Bundle Building:
The Basic tool I use to construct bundles is the spectral construction which relies on the machinery of Fourier-Mukai transforms. Fourier-Mukai transform relates spaces of sheaves on one algebraic variety to the space of sheaves on another related variety. Certain types of vector bundles have particularly simple Fourier-Mukai transforms (they are just line bundles supported on smooth curves in the dual variety). We exploit this fact to build physically interesting bundles.
Mukai originally used the Fourier-Mukai transform to study the moduli of bundles on surfaces [30] and it has been used extensively to study moduli spaces of bundles on Elliptic Fibrations [17], [35]. Recently it has been used to give very short proofs of Atiyah's classification of bundles on elliptic curves [21] and [34]. For Calabi-Yaus it has been especially fruitful, for instance, [10] provides criteria for a Calabi-Yau fibration
and a connected component of its moduli space of stable sheaves to have equivalent derived categories. The proof relies heavily on the machinery of Fourier-Mukai transforms.
Let
and
be algebraic varieties and consider an object
, the Fourier-Mukai transform with kernel
is a map
given by
S
, where all maps are in the derived category. We will also consider a relative Fourier-Mukai transform. We'll take the kernel to be the Poincaré sheaf
on Y, the relative moduli space of degree 0 line bundles on
.
A key property of the Fourier-Mukai transform is that it descends to a linear map on cohomology
s
. In the case that
S
is an equivalence,
s
is an isomorphism of vector spaces.
The spectral construction uses Fourier-Mukai transforms to build bundles with specified Chern classes over abelian variety fibered varieties
[12]. It relies on the result that for a single abelian variety
, with
its dual, the Fourier-Mukai transform of a sheaf
on A with finite support is a flat vector bundle on
.
In the relative case, if we can construct a dual fibration
, with relative universal sheaf
, then, given a curve
in
, finite over B, and a vector bundle
on
, the Fourier-Mukai transform
S
is a vector bundle on
, flat on the fibers of
. In many cases this construction reduces the hard problem of building a bundle on
to the simpler problem of building a line bundle on the spectral curve. Using the descent of the Fourier-Mukai transform to a linear map on cohomology, we can construct a spectral sheaf whose Fourier-Mukai transform yields a vector bundle with specified Chern classes. We note in passing that in general
s
is not a diagonal matrix and there is mixing of the degree of the cohomology classes.
In general we expect that we will have to combine the spectral construction with other bundle building techniques such as the Serre Construction and other extension methods in order to meet the requirements from physics.
Past Results:
I have carried out the above analysis in detail for the
class Gross-Popescu Calabi-Yaus. These examples arise from explicit constructions of the moduli of
-polarized abelian varieties with level structure for
, originally considered in some detail in [20]. For each
we have an abelian surface fibration,
. The fibration is flat but not smooth. We will use quotients of
by a freely acting group
as our target variety
on which we examine the moduli of vector bundles.
For the
and
case we've shown that:
One of the nice features of this construction is that we are able to characterize stability in terms of geometric data regarding the spectral cover. Consider a spectral curve
with a line bundle
supported on
. Associated to this data via the Fourier-Mukai transform is a vector bundle
or rank
on the dual fibration. Write
for the spectral curve associate with
.
New Prospects:
We would like to make a systematic survey of possible Calabi-Yau on which it is possible to build physically realistic Heterotic Models. We expect the bundle building techniques we developed while completing [3] will apply with some modifications to other families of abelian surfaces.
The primary difficulty in extending these techniques is an understanding of what happens on the singular fibers of the fibration. To make a complete description we need a detailed understanding of Fourier-Mukai transforms and stable bundles on these degenerations as well as a global understanding of the kernel sheaf used in the Fourier-Mukai transform.
For physical reasons we want to consider non-simply connected Calabi-Yaus. Most of the known Calabi-Yau varieties are simply connected while those considered here have some of the largest known fundamental groups. It is notoriously difficult to find such Calabi-Yaus; In a survey of 473,800,776 [5] found only 32 families with nonzero
. Having a nontrivial fundamental group gives more flexibility when building physical models. For this reason we propose examining several families with non-trivial fundamental groups as they are expected to be candidates for the so called ``peaks'' in the string landscape.
The first set of families we would like to consider are the rest of the Gross-Popescu Calabi-Yaus. These are very closely related to the ones already examined in some detail above. They arise from explicit constructions of the moduli of
-polarized abelian varieties with level structure for
. For each
we have an abelian surface fibration,
. The fibration is flat but not smooth. We will use quotients of
by a freely acting group
as our target variety
on which we examine the moduli of vector bundles. This means that all have fundamental groups of order bounded by
, not necessarily abelian [7].
Another promising family of Abelian surfaces are the Saito manifolds considered in [38]. These do not necessarily have a natural uniform relative polarization and we expect the need to further refine the spectral construction to handle this case.
Once we find a physically viable model we can make further calculations. It becomes a straightforward computation to determine relevant physical quantities testing our model. For instance, the tri-linear couplings will give predictions that can be matched with Yukawa couplings in the standard model. Potentially, these Calabi-Yaus can improve on the calculations in [9] since large fundamental groups allows for a more careful tuning of the texture parameter.