Spinor-Vector Duality in Heterotic SUSY Vacua

TL;DR

This paper explores the spinor-vector duality in heterotic string vacua, providing a new proof and rules for identifying dual models, which enhances understanding of the string theory vacua landscape.

Contribution

It offers a simple proof and explicit rules for the spinor-vector duality in heterotic vacua, linking orbifold compactifications to duality transformations.

Findings

A new proof of the spinor-vector duality

Explicit rules to find dual models

Insight into the structure of string vacua

Abstract

We elaborate on the recently discovered spinor-vector duality in realistic free fermionic heterotic vacua. We emphasize the interpretation of the freely-acting orbifolds carried out on the six internal dimensions as coordinate-dependent compactifications; they play a central role in the duality, especially because of their ability to break the right-moving superconformal algebra of the space-time supersymmetric heterotic vacua. These considerations lead to a simple and intuitive proof of the spinor-vector duality, and to the formulation of explicit rules to find the dual of a given model. We discuss the interest of such a duality, notably concerning the structure of the space of vacua of superstring theory.