Marginal deformations of vacua with massive boson–fermion degeneracy symmetry

Abstract

Two-dimensional string vacua with Massive Spectrum boson–fermion Degeneracy Symmetry, [ MSDS ] d = 2 , are explicitly constructed in Type II and Heterotic superstring theories. The study of their moduli space indicates the existence of large marginal deformations that connect continuously the initial [ MSDS ] d = 2 vacua to higher-dimensional conventional superstring vacua, where spacetime supersymmetry is spontaneously broken by geometrical fluxes. We find that the maximally symmetric, [ Max : MSDS ] d = 2 , Type II vacuum, is in correspondence with the maximal, N = 8 , d = 4 “gauged supergravity”, where the supergravity gauging is induced by the fluxes. This correspondence is extended to less symmetric cases where the initial MSDS symmetry is reduced by orbifolds: [ Z orb : MSDS ] d = 2 ↔ [ N ⩽ 8 : SUGRA ] d = 4 , fluxes . We also exhibit and analyse thermal interpretations of some Euclidean versions of the models and identify classes of MSDS vacua that remain tachyon-free under arbitrary marginal deformations about the extended symmetry point. The connection between the two-dimensional MSDS vacua and the resulting four-dimensional effective supergravities arises naturally within the context of an adiabatic cosmological evolution, where the very early Universe is conjectured to be described by an MSDS vacuum, while at late cosmological times it is described by an effective N = 1 supergravity theory with spontaneously broken supersymmetry.