Moduli stabilization from magnetic fluxes in type I string theory

Abstract

We show that type I string theory compactified in four dimensions in the presence of constant internal magnetic fields possesses N = 1 supersymmetric vacua, in which all Kähler class and complex structure closed string moduli are fixed. Furthermore, their values can be made arbitrarily large by a suitable tuning of the quantized magnetic fluxes. We present an explicit example for the toroidal compactification on T 6 and discuss Calabi–Yau generalizations. This mechanism can be complementary to other stabilization methods using closed string fluxes but has the advantage of having an exact string description and thus a validity away from the low-energy supergravity approximation. Moreover, it can be easily implemented in constructions of string models based on intersecting D-branes.