Geometry and Swampland (Online) (22w5083)

The Banff International Research Station will host the "Geometry and Swampland" workshop in Banff from January 23 - 28, 2022.

Despite its undeniable success, there are evidences that the Standard Model cannot be the fundamental theory of electromagnetic, weak and strong interactions. The search for a theory beyond the Standard Model is deeply connected to another fundamental question in theoretical physics, namely understanding the structure of quantum gravity. Whatever effective theory might describe particle interactions beyond the observable energy scale must eventually be completed into quantum gravity. Recently, a lot of activity has been devoted to determine criteria which differentiate between effective low-energy field theories that can be consistently coupled to quantum gravity from theories that, even if they seem to be consistent, cannot. In the current jargon, the former are said to be in the `Landscape' while the latter form the so-called `Swampland'. A number of such criteria, or Swampland Conjectures, have been proposed in the literature and attracted considerable interest in the high energy physics community. The Swampland Conjectures have profound implications for many open issues in physics and cosmology, such as the structure of large field inflation in early-time cosmology, or the mechanism responsible for the observed late-time acceleration of the universe, to name some of the most striking examples. It is therefore extremely important and timely to put such conjectures on firmer grounds.

A concrete and particularly well developed framework to address specific questions of quantum gravity is String Theory, where the Swampland conjectures translate into conjectures regarding the structure of possible string geometries. Recent work has shown that these geometries have an elegant reformulation in terms of a generalized version of Riemannian geometry. The goal of this workshop is to explore the intriguing connections between general properties of quantum gravity and the generalized geometry of string theory. The workshop aims to bring together the swampland community and the generalized geometry community at this unique time in which our understanding of the Swampland is quickly evolving.

The Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery (BIRS) is a collaborative Canada-US-Mexico venture that provides an environment for creative interaction as well as the exchange of ideas, knowledge, and methods within the Mathematical Sciences, with related disciplines and with industry. The research station is located at The Banff Centre in Alberta and is supported by Canada's Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), Alberta's Advanced Education and Technology, and Mexico's Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT).