Abstract
In addition to the familiar string theories with spacetime supersymmetry, there exist a number of non-supersymmetric ten-dimensional superstrings. Nearly all of these theories have closed string tachyons, indicating a misidentification of the vacuum around which they are to be quantized. In this work, we identify (meta)stable vacua for all known tachyonic superstrings. These vacua are all lower-dimensional, with most of them being familiar two-dimensional string theories. However, there are also intriguing examples of solutions in dimensions 6, 8, and 9, with respective gauge groups $E_7 \times E_7$, $SU(16)$, and $E_8$. These special vacua have positive vacuum energy and no moduli.
Highlights
One of the long-touted virtues of string theory is its apparent uniqueness
The Type IIA/B, heterotic SOð32Þ, heterotic E8 × E8, and Type I superstring theories have all been shown to be different perturbative descriptions of a single underlying theory. These five descriptions are typically given as expansions around ten-dimensional flat space, where they are tachyon free and have manifest spacetime supersymmetry
It has long been known that there exist additional, nonsupersymmetric superstring theories, which lie outside of the standard duality web
Summary
One of the long-touted virtues of string theory is its apparent uniqueness. Famously, the Type IIA/B, heterotic SOð32Þ, heterotic E8 × E8, and Type I superstring theories have all been shown to be different perturbative descriptions of a single underlying theory. It has long been known that there exist additional, nonsupersymmetric superstring theories, which lie outside of the standard duality web. There are, some interesting cases in which tachyonic ten-dimensional string theories do not admit a stable 2D vacuum, at least not via the simplest condensation mechanism. For those cases, we will instead identify stable vacua in dimensions d > 2. For the heterotic E8, Uð16Þ, and ðE7 × SUð2ÞÞ2 heterotic strings, we will identify stable vacua in dimensions d 1⁄4 9, 8, and 6.3 All of the resulting lower-dimensional theories are free of perturbative anomalies, and interestingly all have positive one-loop cosmological constant. III, we consider tachyon condensation of oriented and unoriented Type 0 string theories, where we will see that all cases can be condensed to known two-dimensional strings
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