Beginners lectures on flux compactifications and related Swampland topics

Understand

These lecture notes provide a pedagogical introduction, with exercises, to the techniques used in attempts to construct vacua with stabilised moduli in string theory.

• The reader is only assumed to have a basic knowledge of general relativity, geometry and field theory.
• We emphasize physical arguments and focus on the latest developments involving the Swampland program that point to a tension for the existence of AdS vacua with small extra dimensions or dS vacua with parametric control.
• We include a brief summary of the current status of these thorny issues.