Calabi-Yau compactifications of non-supersymmetric heterotic string theory

Abstract

Phenomenological explorations of heterotic strings have conventionally focused primarily on the E8xE8 theory. We consider smooth compactifications of all three ten-dimensional heterotic theories to exhibit the many similarities between the non-supersymmetric SO(16)xSO(16) theory and the related supersymmetric E8xE8 and SO(32) theories. In particular, we exploit these similarities to determine the bosonic and fermionic spectra of Calabi-Yau compactifications with line bundles of the non-supersymmetric string. We use elements of four-dimensional supersymmetric effective field theory to characterize the non-supersymmetric action at leading order and determine the Green-Schwarz induced axion-couplings. Using these methods we construct a non-supersymmetric Standard Model(SM)-like theory. In addition, we show that it is possible to obtain SM-like models from the standard embedding using at least an order four Wilson line. Finally, we make a proposal of the states that live on five branes in the SO(16)xSO(16) theory and find under certain assumptions the surprising result that anomaly factorization only admits at most a single brane solution.