Populating the swampland: the case of U(1)(496) and E-8 x U(1)(248)

作者：Fiol Bartomeu^*

来源：The Journal of High Energy Physics, 2010, (7): 090.

DOI：10.1007/JHEP07(2010)090

• Superstrings and Heterotic Strings
• Spacetime Singularities
• Superstring Vacua

For d = 10 N = 1 SUGRA coupled to d = 10 N = 1 SYM, anomaly cancellation places severe constraints on the allowed gauge groups. Besides the ones known to appear in string theory, only U(1)(496) and E-8 x U(1)(248) are allowed. There are no known theories of quantum gravity that reduce in some limit to these two last supergravity theories, and in this note I present some evidence that those quantum theories might not exist. The first observation is that, upon compactification, requiring that the quantum theory possesses a moduli space with finite volume typically implies the existence of singularities where the 4d gauge group is enhanced, but for these two theories that gauge enhancement is problematic from the 10d point of view. I also point out that while these four supergravity theories present repulson-type singularities, the known mechanism that repairs those singularities for the first two - the non-Abelian enhancon - is not available for the last two theories. In short, these two supergravity theories might be too Abelian for their own good.

• 出版日期2010-7