Talks

In this talk, we will outline some recent developments in heterotic string compactifications and related notions. First, we will review some work on nonperturbative corrections to analogues of 27^3 and 27^*^3 couplings, generalizing computations in the topological A and B models. Second, we will discuss a potential heterotic swampland -- obstructions to describing heterotic supergravity backgrounds with the traditional heterotic CFT construction -- and some nontraditional heterotic worldsheet constructions that can be used to describe the `missing' CFT's. Finally, as time permits we will outline new string compactifications, namely strings on generalizations of spaces known as stacks, and how ideas from those string compactifications can be used to understand ordinary-seeming gauged linear sigma models, and to provide new heterotic CFT's.

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Proceedings contribution