Supergravity from the Weakly Coupled Heterotic String * † Disclaimer

The weakly coupled vacuum of E8⊗E8 heterotic string theory remains a promising candidate for the underlying theory of the Standard Model. The particle spectrum and the issue of dilaton stabilization are reviewed. Specific models for hidden sector condensation and supersymmetry breaking are described and their phenomenological and cosmological implications are discussed. Talk presented at Sugra20, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, March 17–21, 2003, to be published in the proceedings. This work was supported in part by the Director, Office of Energy Research, Office of High Energy and Nuclear Physics, Division of High Energy Physics of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract DE-AC03-76SF00098 and in part by the National Science Foundation under grants PHY-0098840 and INT-9910077.