Using canonical 1-parameter family of Hermitian connections on the tangent bundle, we provide invariant solutions to the Strominger system on certain complex Lie groups and their quotients. Both flat and non-flat cases are discussed in detail. This paper answers a question proposed by Andreas and Garcia-Fernandez in Comm Math Phys 332(3):13811383, 2014.

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In this article, we study the small sphere limit of the WangYau quasi-local energy defined in Wang and Yau (Phys Rev Lett 102(2):021101, 2009, Commun Math Phys 288(3):919942, 2009). Given a point <i>p</i> in a spacetime <i>N</i>, we consider a canonical family of surfaces approaching <i>p</i> along its future null cone and evaluate the limit of the WangYau quasi-local energy. The evaluation relies on solving an optimal embedding equation whose solutions represent critical points of the quasi-local energy. For a spacetime with matter fields, the scenario is similar to that of the large sphere limit found in Chen etal. (Commun Math Phys 308(3):845863, 2011). Namely, there is a natural solution which is a local minimum, and the limit of its quasi-local energy recovers the stress-energy tensor at <i>p</i>. For a vacuum spacetime, the quasi-local energy vanishes to higher order and the solution of the optimal embedding

We compute the string production rate at the end of inflation, using the string spectrum obtained in [M. Li, W. Song, Y. Song, Quantizing strings in de Sitter space, JHEP 0704 (2007) 042, hep-th/0701258] in a near-de Sitter space. Our result shows that highly excited strings are hardly produced, thus the simple slow-roll inflation alone does not offer a cosmic string production mechanism.

String theory has had a profound influence on research in Calabi-Yau spaces over the past twenty-five years. We first briefly mention some of the work in Khler Calabi-Yau manifolds that was influenced by the discovery of mirror symmetry in the late 1980s. We then discuss some of the mathematical motivations behind the recent work on non-Khler Calabi-Yau manifolds, which arise in string compactifications with fluxes. After extending mirror symmetry to non-Khler Calabi-Yau manifolds, we show how this leads to new cohomologies and invariants of non-Khler symplectic manifolds.