Lectures on Gauged Supergravity and Flux Compactifications

The low-energy effective theories describing string compactifications in the presence of fluxes are so-called gauged supergravities: deformations of the standard abelian supergravity theories. The deformation parameters can be identified with the various possible (geometric and non-geometric) flux components. In these lecture notes we review the construction of gauged supergravities in a manifestly duality covariant way and illustrate the construction in several examples.Comment: 48 pages, lectures given at the RTN Winter School on Strings, Supergravity and Gauge Theories, CERN, January 200