Abelian gauge symmetries in F-theory and dual theories

In this dissertation, we focus on important physical and mathematical aspects, especially abelian gauge symmetries, of F-theory compactifications and its dual formulations within type IIB and heterotic string theory. F-theory is a non-perturbative formulation of type IIB string theory which enjoys important dualities with other string theories such as M-theory and E8 × E8 heterotic string theory. One of the main strengths of F-theory is its geometrization of many physical problems in the dual string theories. In particular, its study requires a lot of mathematical tools such as advanced techniques in algebraic geometry. Thus, it has also received a lot of interests among mathematicians, and is a vivid area of research within both the physics and the mathematics community. Although F-theory has been a long-standing theory, abelian gauge symmetry in Ftheory has been rarely studied, until recently. Within the mathematics community, in 2009, Grassi and Perduca first discovered the possibility of constructing elliptically fibered varieties with non-trivial toric Mordell-Weil group. In the physics community, in 2012, Morrison and Park first made a major advancement by constructing general F-theory compactifications with U(1) abelian gauge symmetry. They found that in such cases, the elliptically-fibered Calabi-Yau manifold that F-theory needs to be compactified on has its fiber being a generic elliptic curve in the blow-up of the weighted projective space P(1;1;2) at one point. Subsequent developments have been made by Cvetič, Klevers and Piragua extended the works of Morrison and Park and constructed general F-theory compactifications with U(1) × U(1) abelian gauge symmetry. They found that in the U(1) × U(1) abelian gauge symmetry case, the elliptically-fibered Calabi-Yau manifold that F-theory needs to be compactified on has its fiber being a generic elliptic curve in the del Pezzo surface dP2. In chapter 2 of this dissertation, I bring this a step further by constructing general F-theory compactifications with U(1) × U(1) × U(1) abelian gauge symmetry. In chapter 1 of this dissertation, I proved finiteness of a region of the string landscape in Type IIB compactifications. String compactifications give rise to a collection of effective low energy theories, known as the string landscape. In chapter 3 of this dissertation, I study abelian gauge symmetries in the duality between F-theory and E8 × E8 heterotic string theory. However, how abelian gauge symmetries can arise in the dual heterotic string theory has never been studied. The main goal of this chapter is to study exactly this. We start with F-theory compactifications with abelian gauge symmetry. With the help of a mathematical lemma as well as a computer code that I came up with, I was able to construct a rich list of specialized examples with specific abelian and nonabelian gauge groups on the F-theory side. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.