Flavor's Delight.

Discrete flavor symmetries provide a promising approach to understand the flavor sector of the standard model of particle physics. Top-down (TD) explanations from string theory reveal two different types of such flavor symmetries: traditional and modular flavor symmetries that combine to the eclectic flavor group. There have been many bottom-up (BU) constructions to fit experimental data within this scheme.

Large hierarchies from approximate R symmetries.

We show that hierarchically small vacuum expectation values of the superpotential in supersymmetric theories can be a consequence of an approximate R symmetry. We briefly discuss the role of such small constants in moduli stabilization and understanding the huge hierarchy between the Planck and electroweak scales.

Low energy supersymmetry from the heterotic string landscape.

We study possible correlations between properties of the observable and hidden sectors in heterotic string theory. Specifically, we analyze the case of the Z6-II orbifold compactification which produces a significant number of models with the spectrum of the supersymmetric standard model. We find that requiring realistic features does affect the hidden sector such that hidden sector gauge group factors SU(4) and SO(8) are favored.