Graduate School in Physics and Astrophysics ------------------------------------------- ANNUAL REPORT ------------------------------------------- Fill with a text editor (without TAB or formatting) Repeat fields for each course as necessary. ------------------------------------------- name: Alberto Merlano email: albemerlano@gmail.com ciclo: XXXI year completed (1,2 or 3):2 supervisor: Associate Professor Carlo Maccaferri ------------------------------------------- GRADUATE SCHOOL COURSES (only completed courses, with examination passed in the year) code: title: Introducing SUSY teacher: Igor Pesando hours: 16 ore code: title: Introduction to Instantons teacher: Marco Billò hours: 16 ore ------------------------------------------- SUMMER SCHOOLS, INTERNATIONAL SCHOOLS (only those attended in the current year) title: LACES 2016 place: GGI Firenze webpage: http://laces.web.cern.ch/Laces/LACES16/index16.html days: november 21 - december 9 talk or poster (Y/N): no ------------------------------------------- CONFERENCES, WORKSHOP (only those attended in the current year) title: Theories of the Fundamental Interactions (tfi) place:campus universitario, Parma webpage: https://agenda.infn.it/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=13289 days: 3 talk or poster (Y/N):no ------------------------------------------- Research activity/Publications in the current year In the last year I have followed the line of research started in the first year of Phd. We have generalized the localization mechanism for the 4-point function from the simple case of the Yang-Mills quartic term to the more complicated example of the instanton effective action of the Super Yang-Mills theories. This field theory example is obtained in string theory from a system of D-3 and D(-1) branes, which forces us to include in the computations boundary conditions changing operators and their excitations. This lead to more sophisticated computations that have been only partially developed in the literature. On general ground we were able to establish that the localization mechanism is true indipendetly from the string background, whenever the subtle N=2 supersymmetry of the worldsheet theory is manifest. This is the most important results we have obtained and will be the main subject of a paper in preparation. We are about to exploit our experience with the instantons to study the problem of marginal deformation of the action and the moduli space of the instantons as seen by string field theory in collaboration with prof. Ivo Sachs and his Phd student from Munich university. This collaboration is just in the beginning. Another direction we are going to porsue next year is to study how this localization mechanism emerges in the so called A-infinity theory, roughly said a gauge fixed version of the Berkovits theory. BE AWARE: research activity and Pubs are not evaluated as didactic credits, but are requested to trace the PhD students' career