Asymmetric Orbifolds, Rank Reduction and Heterotic Islands
High Energy Physics - Theory
2025-05-01 v2
Abstract
We consider toroidal asymmetric orbifolds of the heterotic string preserving all 16 supercharges, developing a general formalism to study components of the moduli space characterized by rank reduction of the gauge group. In particular we construct six- and four-dimensional heterotic islands with no massless moduli other than the dilaton. The formalism involves the Leech lattice, its automorphisms and their corresponding invariant and normal, or coinvariant, sublattices.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2501.17228,
title = {Asymmetric Orbifolds, Rank Reduction and Heterotic Islands},
author = {Gerardo Aldazabal and Eduardo Andrés and Anamaría Font and Kumar Narain and Ida G. Zadeh},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.17228},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
38 pages + appendices; v2: comments added, typos corrected, phase in eq. (3.36) corrected, references updated