Flux vacua and compactification on smooth compact toric varieties

The study of flux vacua is a primordial step in the understanding of string compactifications and their phenomenological properties. In presence of flux the internal manifold ceases to be Calabi-Yau, but still admits an SU(3) structure which becomes thus the preferred framework. After introducing the relevant geometrical notions this thesis explores the role that fluxes play in supersymmetric compactification through several approaches. At first consistent truncations of type IIA supergravity are considered. It is shown that fermionic condensates can help support fluxes and generate a positive contribution to the cosmological constant. These truncations thus admit de Sitter vacua which are otherwise extremely difficult to get, if not impossible. The argument is initially performed with dilatino condensates and then improved by suggesting a mechanism to generate gravitino condensates from gravitational instantons. Then the focus shifts towards branes and their behavior under non abelian T-duality. The duals of several D-brane solutions of type II supergravity are computed and the branes are tracked down by investigating the fluxes and the charges they carry. The supersymmetric D2 brane is further studied by checking explicitly the generalized spinor equations and discussing the possibility of a massive deformation. The last chapter gives a systematic construction of SU(3) structures on a wide class of compact toroidal varieties. The construction defines a sphere bundle on an arbitrary two-dimensional toroidal variety but also works when the base is Kahler-Einstein. (author)