English

Holomorphic supergravity in ten dimensions and anomaly cancellation

High Energy Physics - Theory 2026-03-09 v3 Differential Geometry

Abstract

We formulate a ten-dimensional version of Kodaira-Spencer gravity on a Calabi-Yau five-fold that reproduces the classical Maurer-Cartan equation governing supersymmetric heterotic moduli. Quantising this theory's quadratic fluctuations, we show that its one-loop partition function simplifies to products of holomorphic Ray-Singer torsions and exhibits an anomaly that factorises as in SO(32)SO(32) and E8×E8E_8\times E_8 supergravity. Based on this, we conjecture that this theory is the SU(5)SU(5)-twisted version of ten-dimensional N=1N=1 supergravity coupled to Yang-Mills and show that is related to the type I Kodaira-Spencer theory of Costello-Li via a non-local field redefinition. The counter-terms needed to cancel the anomaly and retain gauge invariance for the one-loop effective theory reconstruct the differential of a recently discovered double-extension complex. This complex has non-tensorial extension classes and its first cohomology counts the infinitesimal moduli of heterotic compactifications modulo order α2\alpha'^2 corrections.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2507.06003,
  title  = {Holomorphic supergravity in ten dimensions and anomaly cancellation},
  author = {Anthony Ashmore and Javier José Murgas Ibarra and Charles Strickland-Constable and Eirik Eik Svanes},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.06003},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

36 pages, v2: Affiliations corrected, Acknowledgements added, v3: version accepted by JHEP

R2 v1 2026-07-01T03:51:26.941Z