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Abstract |
It is generally believed that string compactifications that can accommodate the standard model of particle physics are few in number. The first message of this talk is that, although such compactifications may be rare and hard to find, their number is substantial. I discuss various aspects of heterotic string compactifications on smooth Calabi-Yau threefolds with abelian internal fluxes and present an approximate analytic relation between the number of such compactifications with the exact charged matter content of the standard model of particle physics and the topological data of the internal manifold, the former scaling exponentially with the number of Kahler parameters. The relation gives about $10^{23}$ string theory standard models for the CICY list |
