Current PhD Thesis Fellows


#Oscar de Felice

I grew up in a small village in the south of Italy, and then I decided to move to Trieste to start a bachelor in Physics. After a master in Theoretical Physics at the Imperial College in London, I began my PhD at LPTHE in October 2014, under the supervision of professor Michela Petrini.

I am interested in the mathematical and formal aspects of string theory. During the master project at Imperial College I worked on the new concept of generalised parallelalisable manifolds and their possible relevance in the context of string compactifications, in particular the problem of finding consistent ways of constructing lower dimensional effective actions (constistent truncations).

For my PhD, the plan is to continue focusing on string compactifications both in type II and heterotic string theories. As a first project, we are working on non-abelian extensions of T-duality. The simplest version of T-duality relates a string theory compactified on a circle of radius R and a string theory compactified on a circle of inverse radius 1/R. This can also be extend to toroidal compactifications, namely manifolds with U(1) isometries and it is proven to be a perturbative duality of the full string theory. The status of possible extensions to non-abelian isometries is much less clear and we hope that Generalised Geometry and maybe generalised parallelisability might help in understanding it better.

Contact: odefelice[at]lpthe.jussieu.fr