Deformations of Special Structures in Dimensions 6 and 7

To be held at ESB 2012 and on Zoom: https://ubc.zoom.us/j/68285564037?pwd=R2ZpLy9uc2pUYldHT3laK3orakg0dz09
Meeting ID: 682 8556 4037
Passcode: 636252

Reception and refreshments at 14:30 in the PIMS Lounge (ESB 4th floor).

Conifold transitions are a mechanism in which a Calabi-Yau 3-fold is deformed into another by contracting curves and smoothing out the resulting conical singularities. Reid's Fantasy conjectures that all Calabi-Yau 3-folds can be linked by a sequence of these transitions. It is further conjectured that these spaces all admit geometries solving a system of PDEs from heterotic string theory. In this talk, I will discuss some results related to these conjectures as well as touch on the 7-dimensional analogue of this problem. Based on joint works with Benjamin Friedman, Sébastien Picard, Henrique N. Sá Earp, and Julieth Saavedra.