Review article on the landscape and and update on our progress

Via Peter Woit, I found this review article on the string theory landscape by fellow graduate student Joseph Conlon, which is not available on the arXiv.
Also, check out Wati Taylor's talk at the Google Labs.

Meanwhile, Timm and I are still trying to construct a realistic (whatever that means) Type IIA T^6/Z_4 orientifold model with fluxes featuring standard model or MSSM-like gauge groups (or some extension, like a Pati-Salam model) on intersecting D6-branes. To this end, we are trying to include "metric fluxes" in our construction, which effectively help to get higher rank gauge groups through compensating some of the other flux contributions to the RR tadpole conditions in favor of more D6-branes.
Switching on metric fluxes is tantamount to compactifying on twisted tori (or nilmanifolds). Therefore we need to understand these constructions in detail. Another problem is to understand the spectrum of stable D-branes (BPS and non-BPS with torsion charges) in this background, in order to construct a consistent intersecting brane model. This means we have to study the twisted equivariant KR-theory (Real K-theory) for our model.