Paul S Aspinwall, Professor of Mathematics and Physics and Director of Graduate Studies

Contact Info:

Office Location:	244 Physics Bldg
Office Phone:	(919) 660-2800
Email Address:
Web Page:	http://www.cgtp.duke.edu/~psa

Teaching (Fall 2008):

• MATH 104.01, LINEAR ALGEBRA & APPLICA Synopsis

  Physics 259, TuTh 10:05 AM-11:20 AM

• MATH 253.01, REPRESENTATION THEORY Synopsis

  Physics 227, TuTh 01:15 PM-02:30 PM

Office Hours:

Monday 1:15-2:15pm
Tuesday 1:15-2:15pm.

Education:

Theoretical Elementary Particle Physics Oxford 1991
9/82-12/88, University College, Oxford

Specialties:

Mathematical Physics
Geometry

Research Interests: String Theory

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

Keywords:

Strings • Calabi-Yau • D-Branes • Mirror

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)  

Recent Publications   (More Publications)

1. P.S. Aspinwall, Topological D-Branes and Commutative Algebra (Preprint, March, 2007) [hep-th/0703279]
2. 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]
3. 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]
4. P.S. Aspinwall and S. Katz, Computation of Superpotentials for D-Branes, Commun. Math. Phys., vol. 264 (2006), pp. 227-253 [hep-th/0412209]
5. P.S. Aspinwall, D-Branes, Pi-Stability and Theta-Stability, in Snowbird Lectures on String Geometry, Contemporary Mathematics, vol. 401 (2006), AMS [hep-th/0407123]

Recent Grant Support

• D-Brane Physics and Calabi-Yau Geometry, National Science Foundation, DMS-03-01476, 2003/06-2006/05.      

Conferences Organized

• School on Mathematics in String and Field Theory, Director, June 2003