The bosonic string on string-size tori from double field theory

Yago Cagnacci (1) , Mariana Graña (2) , Sergio Iguri (3, 1) , Carmen Núñez (1, 3)

1 IAFE - Instituto de Astronomía y Física del Espacio [Buenos Aires]
2 IPHT - Institut de Physique Théorique - UMR CNRS 3681
3 Departamento de Física [Buenos Aires]

We construct the effective action for toroidal compactifications of bosonic string theory from generalized Scherk-Schwarz reductions of double field theory. The enhanced gauge symmetry arising at special points in moduli space is incorporated into this framework by promoting the $O(k,k)$ duality group of $k$-tori compactifications to $O(n,n)$, $n$ being the dimension of the enhanced gauge group, which allows to account for the full massless sector of the theory. We show that the effective action reproduces the right masses of scalar and vector fields when moving sligthly away from the points of maximal symmetry enhancement. The neighborhood of the enhancement points in moduli space can be neatly explored by spontaneous symmetry breaking. We generically discuss toroidal compactifications of arbitrary dimensions and maximally enhanced gauge groups, and then inspect more closely the example of $T^2$ at the $SU(3)_L \times SU(3)_R$ point, which is the simplest setup containing all the non trivialities of the generic case. We show that the entire moduli space can be described in a unified way by considering compactifications on higher dimensional tori.

Keywords: Bosonic Strings; String Duality

Domains: Mathematical Physics [math-ph]

Yago Cagnacci, Mariana Graña, Sergio Iguri, Carmen Núñez. The bosonic string on string-size tori from double field theory. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2017, 6, pp.1-51. ⟨10.1007/JHEP04(2017)078⟩. ⟨cea-01542961⟩