Discrete symmetries in the heterotic-string landscape

P Athanasopoulos

doi:10.1088/1742-6596/631/1/012083

Abstract

We describe a new type of discrete symmetry that relates heterotic-string models. It is based on the spectral flow operator which normally acts within a general N = (2, 2) model and we use this operator to construct a map between N = (2, 0) models. The landscape of N = (2, 0) models is of particular interest among all heterotic-string models for two important reasons: Firstly, N =1 spacetime SUSY requires (2, 0) superconformal invariance and secondly, models with the well motivated by the Standard Model SO(10) unification structure are of this type. This idea was inspired by a new discrete symmetry in the space of fermionic ℤ2 × ℤ2 heterotic-string models that exchanges the spinors and vectors of the SO(10) GUT group, dubbed spinor-vector duality. We will describe how to generalize this to arbitrary internal rational Conformal Field Theories.

Highlights

String theory provides the most promising framework for a fundamental theory of physics
Iii) Whenever the internal Conformal Field Theories (CFTs) can be written as a tensor product of N = 2 superconformal theories, the Gepner models [6] being such an example, each term comes with a spectral flow operator β0i
We focused on the heterotic-string landscape of (2, 0) models which are of great interest because of the requirement of spacetime SUSY and the accommodation of SO(10) unification

Summary

Introduction

String theory provides the most promising framework for a fundamental theory of physics. The appearance of the SO(10) and E8 weights is very general in heterotic models and can be thought of as arising from the bosonic string map [6, 7]. The bosonic string map provides an elegant way to make compatible the following statements: i) The only generic means of achieving modular invariance in a non-free CFT is to have a left-right symmetric spectrum.

Results

Conclusion