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Global aspects of moduli spaces of 2d SCFTs, the Bagger-Witten line bundle, and the swampland

Seminar

Specialist level

Speaker:

Eric Sharpe

Institution:

Virginia Tech

Location&Place:

IFT Seminar Room/Red Room

Abstract:

This talk will concern advances in understanding explicitly the Bagger-Witten line bundle appearing in four-dimensional N=1 supergravity. This has recently been a subject of interest, but explicit examples have proven elusive in the past. In this talk we will outline some recent advances, including (1) a description of the Bagger-Witten line bundle on a moduli space of Calabi-Yau's as a line bundle of covariantly constant spinors (as opposed to holomorphic top-forms), (2) results that it is always flat, but possibly never trivial (building on work of Seiberg, Komargodski, Theisen, et al). We will propose its nontriviality as a new criterion for existence of UV completions of four-dimensional supergravity theories. If time permits, we will explicitly construct an example, to concretely display these properties.