Heterotic flux vacua with a small superpotential
4 affiliations
- 1The University of Western Australia
- 2University of Birmingham
- 3University of Oxford
- 4University of Pennsylvania
Abstract
A bstract : We study heterotic Calabi-Yau compactifications with NSNS three-form flux in view of moduli stabilisation and investigate whether the value | W ₀ | of the flux superpotential evaluated at supersymmetric minima can be small. Unlike in type IIB string theory, heterotic compactifications lack a no-scale structure, so that a non-vanishing flux superpotential generically induces a tree-level scalar potential for all moduli. Controlled moduli stabilisation therefore requires the flux superpotential to be sufficiently small in order to compete with non-perturbative effects. Working within a four-dimensional effective field theory and exploiting the special geometry of Calabi-Yau complex structure moduli spaces, we analyse the complex structure F-term equations and derive two no-go theorems: (1) supersymmetric vacua with vanishing | W ₀ |, which would lead to a vanishing tree-level scalar potential as in type IIB, occur only at singular loci in moduli space, and (2) no supersymmetric vacua with small | W ₀ | exist in the large complex structure limit. Motivated by these results, we analyse explicit models away from the large complex structure regime using exact period expressions and identify one- and two-parameter examples in which suitable flux choices allow for values of | W ₀ | of order unity, with some one-parameter models admitting values moderately below unity. Our findings show that small heterotic flux superpotentials are highly constrained, with the values of | W ₀ | found in the examples studied being only marginally compatible with moduli stabilisation.
Related
BibTeX
@article{buchbinder2026heterotic,
title = {{Heterotic flux vacua with a small superpotential}},
author = {Evgeny I. Buchbinder and Andrei Constantin and Lucas T. Y. Leung and Andre Lukas and Burt Ovrut},
journal = {Journal of High Energy Physics},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.1007/jhep10(2026)085},
url = {https://link.springer.com/10.1007/JHEP10(2026)085},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Heterotic flux vacua with a small superpotential
AU - Evgeny I. Buchbinder
AU - Andrei Constantin
AU - Lucas T. Y. Leung
AU - Andre Lukas
AU - Burt Ovrut
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/08
JO - Journal of High Energy Physics
DO - 10.1007/jhep10(2026)085
UR - https://link.springer.com/10.1007/JHEP10(2026)085
AB - A bstract : We study heterotic Calabi-Yau compactifications with NSNS three-form flux in view of moduli stabilisation and investigate whether the value | W ₀ | of the flux superpotential evaluated at supersymmetric minima can be small. Unlike in type IIB string theory, heterotic compactifications lack a no-scale structure, so that a non-vanishing flux superpotential generically induces a tree-level scalar potential for all moduli. Controlled moduli stabilisation therefore requires the flux superpotential to be sufficiently small in order to compete with non-perturbative effects. Working within a four-dimensional effective field theory and exploiting the special geometry of Calabi-Yau complex structure moduli spaces, we analyse the complex structure F-term equations and derive two no-go theorems: (1) supersymmetric vacua with vanishing | W ₀ |, which would lead to a vanishing tree-level scalar potential as in type IIB, occur only at singular loci in moduli space, and (2) no supersymmetric vacua with small | W ₀ | exist in the large complex structure limit. Motivated by these results, we analyse explicit models away from the large complex structure regime using exact period expressions and identify one- and two-parameter examples in which suitable flux choices allow for values of | W ₀ | of order unity, with some one-parameter models admitting values moderately below unity. Our findings show that small heterotic flux superpotentials are highly constrained, with the values of | W ₀ | found in the examples studied being only marginally compatible with moduli stabilisation.
SN - 1029-8479
ER -