Jefferson J368, 17 Oxford Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
Title: Revisiting Frozen Singularities
Abstract: Frozen singularities occupy a perhaps mysterious corner of the string landscape. While it has been known for a long time that compactifying M-theory on an ADE singularity with a fractional flux reduces the rank of the 7D gauge algebra, virtually all known statements of these systems rely on appealing to various string dualities. In this talk, I will present a duality-free argument for why the blow-up modes of these singularities freeze and how this leads to the list of frozen gauge algebras. Additionally, I will address a puzzle concerning the higher-form symmetries of the E8 singularity with 1/4 flux, and the construction of an 8D topological theory that performs the Green-Schwarz cancellation mechanism for frozen F-theory 7-branes as conjectured by García-Etxebarria et al.