Supersymmetry and the Supergravity Landscape

Abstract

In the recent times a lot of effort has been devoted to improve our knowledge about the space of string theory vacua ("the landscape") to find statistical grounds to justify how and why the theory selects its vacuum. Particularly interesting are those vacua that preserve some supersymmetry, which are always supersymmetric solutions of some supergravity theory. After an general introduction to how the pursuit of unification has lead to the vacuum selection problem, we are going to review some recent results on the problem of finding all the supersymmetric solutions of a supergravity theory. We will also review some interesting solutions that have been discovered using these methods and their relations.