Supersymmetry versus gauge symmetry on the heterotic landscape

Journal Article · Fri Jun 15 04:00:00 EDT 2007 · Physical Review. D, Particles Fields

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PHYSREVD.75.126005· OSTI ID:20935342

Dienes, Keith R; Lennek, Michael; Wasnik, Vaibhav ^[1]; Senechal, David ^[2]

---

1. Department of Physics, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721 (United States)
2. Departement de Physique, Universite de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, Quebec J1K 2R1 (Canada)

One of the goals of the landscape program in string theory is to extract information about the space of string vacua in the form of statistical correlations between phenomenological features that are otherwise uncorrelated in field theory. Such correlations would thus represent predictions of string theory that hold independently of a vacuum-selection principle. In this paper, we study statistical correlations between two features which are likely to be central to any potential description of nature at high-energy scales: gauge symmetries and spacetime supersymmetry. We analyze correlations between these two kinds of symmetry within the context of perturbative heterotic string vacua, and find a number of striking features. We find, for example, that the degree of spacetime supersymmetry is strongly correlated with the probabilities of realizing certain gauge groups, with unbroken supersymmetry at the string scale tending to favor gauge-group factors with larger rank. We also find that nearly half of the heterotic landscape is nonsupersymmetric and yet tachyon-free at tree level; indeed, less than a quarter of the tree-level heterotic landscape exhibits any supersymmetry at all at the string scale.

• OSTI ID: 20935342
• Journal Information: Physical Review. D, Particles Fields, Journal Name: Physical Review. D, Particles Fields Journal Issue: 12 Vol. 75; ISSN PRVDAQ; ISSN 0556-2821
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS
CORRELATIONS
FIELD THEORIES
GAUGE INVARIANCE
POTENTIALS
PROBABILITY
SPACE-TIME
STRING THEORY
SUPERSYMMETRY
TACHYONS