Hunting for de Sitter vacua in the String Landscape – Gary Shiu

Date: Tue. April 17th, 2012, 11:30 am-12:30 pm
Location: Rockefeller 221

Results from observational cosmology suggest that our universe is currently accelerating. The simplest explanation is that we are living in a universe with a positive cosmological constant. In this talk, I will describe some recent attempts in constructing such solutions in string theory and discuss the difficulties one encounters in finding metastable de Sitter vacua. Thus, the requirement of positive cosmological constant and stability imposes strong constraints on the string theory landscape.