The landscape of free fermionic gauge models.

A software framework is developed to systematically construct a particular class of weakly coupled free fermionic heterotic string models, dubbed gauge models. In their purest form, these models are maximally supersymmetric (N = 4), and thus only contain superpartners in their matter sector. This feature makes their systematic construction particularly efficient, and they are thus useful in their simplicity. We first provide a brisk introduction to heterotic strings and the spin-structure construction of free fermionic models. Three systematic surveys are then presented, and we conjecture that these surveys are exhaustive modulo redundancies. Finally we present a collection of metaheuristic algorithms for searching the landscape for models with a user-specified spectrum of phenomenological properties, e.g. gauge group and number of spacetime supersymmetries. Such algorithms provide the groundwork for extended generic free fermionic surveys.