1:30 pm MCP 201
Developments in the Bagger-Witten and Hodge line bundles, Eric Sharpe, Virginia Tech
This talk will concern advancesin understanding explicitly the Bagger-Witten line bundle appearing infour-dimensional N=1 supergravity, which is closely related to the Hodge linebundle on a moduli space of Calabi-Yaus. This has recently been a subject ofinterest, but explicit examples have proven elusive in the past. In thistalk we will outline some recent advances, including (1) a description of theBagger-Witten line bundle on a moduli space of Calabi-Yau's as a line bundle ofcovariantly constant spinors (resulting in a square root of the Hodge linebundle of holomorphic top-forms), (2) results suggesting that it (and the Hodgeline bundle) is always flat, but possibly never trivial, over moduli spaces ofCalabi-Yaus of maximal holonomy and dimension other than two. We willpropose its nontriviality as a new criterion for existence of UV completions offour-dimensional supergravity theories. If time permits, we will explicitlyconstruct an example, to concretely display these properties, and outlineresults obtained with Ron Donagi and Mark Macerato for other cases.