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Non-Supersymmetric Heterotic Strings on a Circle
by Bernardo Fraiman, Mariana Graña, Héctor Parra De Freitas and Savdeep Sethi
Submission summary
| Authors (as registered SciPost users): | Mariana Graña |
| Submission information | |
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| Preprint Link: | scipost_202403_00004v1 (pdf) |
| Date submitted: | 2024-03-05 08:47 |
| Submitted by: | Graña, Mariana |
| Submitted to: | SciPost Physics |
| Ontological classification | |
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| Academic field: | Physics |
| Specialties: |
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| Approach: | Theoretical |
Abstract
Motivated by a recent construction of non-supersymmetric AdS_3, we revisit the O(16) x O(16) heterotic string compactified on a torus. The string one-loop potential energy has interesting dependence on the classical moduli; extrema of this potential include loci where the gauge symmetry is maximally enhanced. Focusing on the case of a circle, we use lattice embeddings to find the maximal enhancement points together with their spectra of massless and tachyonic modes. We find an extended Dynkin diagram that encodes the global structure of the moduli space, as well as all symmetry enhancements and the loci where they occur. We find 107 points of maximal enhancement with 8 that are free of tachyons. The tachyon-free points each have positive cosmological constant. We determine the profile of the potential energy near each of these points and find that one is a maximum while three are saddle points. The remaining four live at the boundary of a tachyonic region in field space. In this way, we show that every point of maximal symmetry enhancement is unstable. We further find that the curvature of this stringy potential satisfies the de Sitter swampland conjecture. Finally, we discuss the implications for constructions of AdS_3.
Current status:
Reports on this Submission
Strengths
None
Weaknesses
In the paper "Non-supersymmetric heterotic string on the circle", the authors consider the construction of several non-supersymmetric compactifications of the O(16)XO(16) heterotic string on a circle and plot and study the one-loop cosmological constant as a function of tree-level moduli.
--- The paper does not introduce any new techniques compared to what has been used in the past 35+ years, and the new things we learn from it is not significant but mostly trivia compared to previous knowledge by adding a few more non-supersymmetric compactifications to the many previously known ones.
I do not think there is much for this paper to be be published in a leading research journal. At best, the results can be included in a thesis.
--- The paper downplays the quantity of previous work done on non-supersymmetric strings:
In the first lines of the introduction it lets us understand that there are a handfull of tachyon free non-supersymmetric heterotic strings and two refs are mentioned.
However, there are many more important references on non-supersymmetric strings (although of course most of the work was done till today on supersymmetric strings) and thousands of non-tachyonic models constructed.
Several original works were done on the so-called Scherk-Schwarz compactifications ,[22] that is mentioned but also ,Phys.Lett.B 197 (1987) 135-138, Phys.Lett.B 206 (1988) 25-31, Nucl.Phys.B 310 (1988) 355-370, Nucl.Phys.B 318 (1989) 75-105
That these theories are real scherk-schwarz compactifications in string theory, was shown later in https://inspirehep.net/literature/441004
The fact that broken susy is always related to towers of states was first discussed in https://inspirehep.net/literature/261144
Among others, Keith Dienes described the largest subset of non-supersymmetric heterotic vacua using the fermionic formulation and a computer algorithm.
These models were first mentioned in https://inspirehep.net/literature/297016.
These models were further analysed statistically in https://inspirehep.net/literature/711399.
Further analysis of a larger set of heterotic models with different amounts of susy including tens of thousands of non-supersymmetric ones was done in https://arxiv.org/abs/0704.1320 and https://arxiv.org/abs/0804.4718
Report
In view of the above, I cannot recommend the publication of this paper in the present journal.
Recommendation
Reject