English

Nearing the Horizon of a Heterotic String

High Energy Physics - Theory 2008-04-01 v2

Abstract

It is argued that recent developments point to the existence of an AdS_3 x S^2 x T^5 holographic dual for the 2D CFT living on the worldsheet of N coincident heterotic strings in a T^5 compactification, which can in turn be described by an exact worldsheet CFT. A supergravity analysis is shown to imply that the global supergroup is Osp(4^*|4), with 16 supercharges and an affine extension given, surprisingly, by a nonlinear N=8 2D superconformal algebra. Possible supergroups with 16 supercharges are also found to match the expected symmetries for T^n compactification with 0<=n<=7.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0708.0016,
  title  = {Nearing the Horizon of a Heterotic String},
  author = {Joshua M. Lapan and Aaron Simons and Andrew Strominger},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0708.0016},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

harvmac; corrected typos in eqns (2.17) and (2.18)

R2 v1 2026-06-21T09:03:38.545Z