Holomorphic supergravity in ten dimensions and anomaly cancellation
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 and supergravity. Based on this, we conjecture that this theory is the -twisted version of ten-dimensional 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 corrections.
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