Research Interest of Peng Gao

      Publication 1: Abelian Fibrations, String Junctions, and Flux/Geometry Duality (URL)
      Publication 2: Topological wave functions and the 4D-5D lift (URL)
      Publication 3: General Type IIB Fluxes with SU(3) Structures (URL)

    URL of Research: 

Statement of Interest:


  My current interest lies in the understanding of dualities in the string theory landscape of flux vacua, and constraints which may be imposed by holographic considerations on the low energy dynamics of string theory vacua. Another area of interest, not so closely tied to string theory per se, is to understand dynamical supersymmetry breaking in supersymmetric theories with chiral matter contents.

In collaboration with Ron Donagi and Michael Schulz, we have constructed a class of Calabi-Yau 3 folds dual to N=2 orientifold flux vacua of Type IIB string with D3 branes. These geometries are shown to agree in all aspects of their topological and geometrical properties with the expectation based on duality arguments. Especially, physical tadpole cancellation conditions find a topological interpretation, and the triple intersection ring of the 2nd cohomology group of the CY is as dictated by the M-theory parent theory. Currently, we are trying to understand the implications for non-perturbative corrections, especially, the worldsheet instantons for the Calabi-Yau geometry determines the D3-instanton corrections of the flux solution. The CY space has a fibaration structure with a peculiar group generated by its sections with rank given by the number of dual D3 branes, it is certain interesting to understand how the same structure arises from the simple looking tori orientifold with flux.

In terms of the holographic considerations, I have been working on the bulk renormalization for a class of anisotropic gravity solutions with chern-simons couplings and background flux, very reminiscient of string theory flux vacua (these are lorentz non-invariant analogues of those). The hope is that we may learn about the dynamics among vaua with different flux and cosmological constant from this toy model, using the boundary theory and RG flows. Another direction of investigation for similar (indirect) information is to study the hydrodynamical properties of flux solutions, which corresponds to having finite chemical potential and other couplings in the boundary theory. 

A more challenging subject area of interest is the understanding of Hitchin moduli space for Higgs bundles on Riemann surfaces, which has recently appeared (again) in greatly different contexts such as Langlands duality, wall crossing of BPS indices and AdS description of many gluon scattering amplitudes.