arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to D. B. Westra.
We study blowups of affine n-space with center an arbitrary monomial ideal and call monomial ideals that render smooth blowups tame ideals. We give a combinatorial criterion to decide whether the blowup is smooth and apply this criterion to discuss a smoothing procedure proposed by Rosenberg, monomial building sets and permutohedra.
We investigate the coset structures which appear in the dimensional reduction of supergravity theories. Especially we investigate how to recognize the global symmetry groups if the coset is non-split. As an example we apply our analysis to the theories emanating from the dimensional reduction of Heterotic supergravity.
We discuss the potential and mass-matrix of gauged N=4 matter coupled supergravity for the case of six matter multiplets, extending previous work by considering the dependence on all scalars. We consider all semi-simple gauge groups and analyse the potential and its first and second derivatives in the origin of the scalar manifold. Although we find in a number of cases an extremum with a positive cosmological constant, these are not stable under fluctuations of all scalar fields.
We investigate the scalar potential of gauged N=4 supergravity with matter. The extremum in the SU(1,1)/U(1) scalars is obtained for an arbitrary number of matter multiplets. The constraints on the matter scalars are solved in terms of an explicit parametrisation of an SO(6,6+n) element. For the case of six matter multiplets we discuss both compact and noncompact gauge groups. In an example involving noncompact groups and four scalars we find a potential with an absolute minimum and a positive cosmological constant.