Residues and world-sheet instantons

Chris Beasley, Edward Witten

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

81 Scopus citations

Abstract

We reconsider the question of which Calabi-Yau compactifications of the heterotic string are stable under world-sheet instanton corrections to the effective space-time superpotential. For instance, compactifications described by (0,2) linear sigma models are believed to be stable, suggesting a remarkable cancellation among the instanton effects in these theories. Here, we show that this cancellation follows directly from a residue theorem, whose proof relies only upon the right-moving world-sheet supersymmetries and suitable compactness properties of the (0,2) linear sigma model. Our residue theorem also extends to a new class of "half-linear" sigma models. Using these half-linear models, we show that heterotic compactifications on the quintic hypersurface in CP4 for which the gauge bundle pulls back from a bundle on CP 4 are stable. Finally, we apply similar ideas to compute the superpotential contributions from families of membrane instantons in M-theory compactifications on manifolds of G2 holonomy.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)1703-1741
Number of pages39
JournalJournal of High Energy Physics
Volume7
Issue number10
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 1 2003
Externally publishedYes

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Keywords

  • M-Theory
  • Solitons Monopoles and Instantons
  • Superstrings and Heterotic Strings

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