Paul S Aspinwall, Associate Professor of Mathematics and Physics  

Paul S Aspinwall

Office Location: 244 Math
Office Phone: (919) 660-2874
Email Address: psa@cgtp.duke.edu
Web Page: http://www.cgtp.duke.edu/~psa/

Specialties:
Mathematical Physics
Geometry

Education:
Theoretical Elementary Particle Physics, Oxford, 1991

Research Categories: String Theory

Research Description:

String theory is hoped to provide a theory of all fundamental physics encompassing both quantum mechanics and general relativity. String theories naturally live in a large number of dimensions and so to make contact with the real world it is necessary to ``compactify'' the extra dimensions on some small compact space. Understanding the physics of the real world then becomes a problem very closely tied to understanding the geometry of the space on which one has compactified. In particular, when one restricts one's attention to ``supersymmetric'' physics the subject of algebraic geometry becomes particularly important.

Of current interest is the notion of ``duality''. Here one obtains the same physics by compactifying two different string theories in two different ways. Now one may use our limited understanding of one picture to fill in the gaps in our limited knowledge of the second picture. This appears to be an extremely powerful method of understanding a great deal of string theory.

Both mathematics and physics appear to benefit greatly from duality. In mathematics one finds hitherto unexpected connections between the geometry of different spaces. ``Mirror symmetry'' was an example of this but many more remain to be explored. On the physics side one hopes to obtain a better understanding of nonperturbative aspects of the way string theory describes the real world.

Areas of Interest:
String Theory
Calabi-Yau Manifolds
D-Branes
Duality

Teaching (Fall 2009):

Recent Publications   (More Publications)

  1. P.S. Aspinwall, D-Branes on Toric Calabi-Yau Varieties (Preprint, 2008) [arXiv:0806.2612] .
  2. P.S. Aspinwall, Topological D-Branes and Commutative Algebra, Communications in Number Theory and Physics (Submitted, March, 2007) [hep-th/0703279] .
  3. P.S. Aspinwall, The Landau-Ginzburg to Calabi-Yau Dictionary for D-Branes, J.Math.Phys., vol. 48 (2007), pp. 082304 .
  4. P.S. Aspinwall Alexander Maloney and Aaron Simons, Black Hole Entropy, Marginal Stability and Mirror Symmetry, J. High Energy Phys., vol. 0707 (2007), pp. 034 [hep-th/0610033]  [abs].
  5. P.S. Aspinwall, The Landau-Ginzburg to Calabi-Yau Dictionary for D-Branes, J. Math. Phys., vol. 48 (2007), pp. 082304 [hep-th/0610209]  [abs].

Curriculum Vitae

Current Ph.D. Students   (Former Students)

  • Arya Roy  
Postdocs Mentored

  • Stefano Guerra (September, 2007 - present)  
  • Robert Duivenvoorden (July, 2005 - August 30, 2006)  
  • K. Narayan (September 1, 2002 - August 30, 2004)  
  • Eric Sharpe (1998/09-2001/09)