Compactifications of string theory in the presence of background fluxes have gained a lot of attention recently.
I will motivate first the introduction of fluxes, and do a brief review of the history of flux compactifications. Concentrating on my own contribution to the field, I will describe a particularly simple class of supersymmetric and nonsupersymmetric solutions with fluxes, and its subsequent applications. Then, we will see the necessary conditions imposed on the most general supersymmetric solution with fluxes, which are naturally described using the recently developed theory of generalized complex geometry. Finally, we will see how supersymmetry breaking fluxes affect the Standard Model masses and couplings in brane realizations of the MSSM.

Ecole Normale Supérieure