Nicole Righi (King's College London)

Modular Forms and the Road to Heterotic Vacua

Heterotic toroidal orbifolds represent a powerful framework to inspect the landscape due to their modular properties. In this talk, I will first review existing no-go theorems on heterotic de Sitter vacua and prove new ones for several classes of vacua, substantiating and extending previous conjectures. I will illustrate a loophole in these theorems and determine criteria that allow for metastable de Sitter vacua, also discussing the stringy non-perturbative effect that could potentially realise such vacua. Then, I will extend this basic setup to higher genera and show how to construct the building blocks needed to write the scalar potential and study brand new vacua.