Heterotic / heterotic duality in D = 6, D = 4

G. ALDAZABAL; A. FONT; L.E. IBANEZ; F. QUEVEDO

PHYSICS LETTERS B

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 1996

0370-2693

We consider E 8 × E 8 heterotic compactifications on K3 and K 3 × T 2 . The idea of heterotic/heterotic duality in D = 6 has difficulties for generic compactifications since for large dilaton values some gauge groups acquire negative kinetic terms. Recently Duff, Minasian and Witten (DMW) suggested a solution to this problem which only works if the compactification is performed assuming the presence of symmetric gauge embeddings on both E 8?s . We consider an alternative in which asymmetric embeddings are possible and the wrong sign of kinetic terms for large dilaton value is a signal of spontaneous symmetry breaking. Upon further toroidal compactification to D = 4, we find that the duals in the DMW case correspond to N = 2 models in which the β-function of the different group factors verify β α = 12 whereas the asymmetric solutions that we propose have βα = 24. We check the consistency of these dualities by studying the different large T, S limits of the gauge kinetic function. Dual N = 1, D = 4 models can also be obtained by the operation of appropriate freely acting twists, as shown in specific examples.