English

Exploring the landscape of heterotic strings on T^d

High Energy Physics - Theory 2020-12-02 v2

Abstract

Compactifications of the heterotic string on T^d are the simplest, yet rich enough playgrounds to uncover swampland ideas: the U(1)^{d+16} left-moving gauge symmetry gets enhanced at special points in moduli space only to certain groups. We state criteria, based on lattice embedding techniques, to establish whether a gauge group is realized or not. For generic d, we further show how to obtain the moduli that lead to a given gauge group by modifying the method of deleting nodes in the extended Dynkin diagram of the Narain lattice II_{1,17}. More general algorithms to explore the moduli space are also developed. For d=1 and 2 we list all the maximally enhanced gauge groups, moduli, and other relevant information about the embedding in II_{d,d+16}. In agreement with the duality between heterotic on T^2 and F-theory on K3, all possible gauge groups on T^2 match all possible ADE types of singular fibers of elliptic K3 surfaces. We also present a simple method to transform the moduli under the duality group, and we build the map that relates the charge lattices and moduli of the compactification of the E_8 x E_8 and Spin(32)/Z_2 heterotic theories.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2007.10358,
  title  = {Exploring the landscape of heterotic strings on T^d},
  author = {Anamaría Font and Bernardo Fraiman and Mariana Graña and Carmen A. Núñez and Héctor Parra De Freitas},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.10358},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

97 pages. v2: references added