High Energy Theory Seminar

In this talk I will discuss recent work constructing heterotic standard models by compactifying on smooth Calabi-Yau three-folds in the presence of purely Abelian internal gauge fields. The simple construction of these models allows for a large-scale, algorithmic approach to heterotic string phenomenology. In particular, a systematic search over complete intersection Calabi-Yau manifolds with less than six Kahler parameters has lead to over 1000 such models with exact SM spectra. In addition, the presence of additional global U(1) symmetries, leads to a rich phenomenological structure and places constraints on Yukawa couplings, R-parity violation, proton stability and neutrino masses.