Geometric Unification of Higgs Bundle Vacua
Abstract
Higgs bundles are a central tool used to study a range of intersecting brane systems in string compactifications. Solutions to the internal gauge theory equations of motion for the corresponding worldvolume theories of branes give rise to different low energy effective field theories. This has been heavily used in the study of M-theory on local spaces and F-theory on local elliptically fibered Calabi-Yau fourfolds. In this paper we show that the 3D effective field theory defined by M-theory on a local space unifies the Higgs bundle data associated with 4D M- and F-theory vacua. This 3D system appears as an interface with finite thickness between different 4D vacua. We develop the general formalism of M-theory on such local spaces, and build explicit interpolating solutions. This provides a complementary local gauge theory analysis of a recently proposed approach to constructing spaces from generalized connected sums.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2003.13682,
title = {Geometric Unification of Higgs Bundle Vacua},
author = {Mirjam Cvetic and Jonathan J. Heckman and Thomas B. Rochais and Ethan Torres and Gianluca Zoccarato},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.13682},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
v2: 65 pages, 5 figures, typos corrected, reference and clarifications added