Abelian Fibrations, String Junctions, and Flux/Geometry Duality

TL;DR

This paper explores dualities between flux-preserving type IIB orientifolds and geometric type IIA Calabi-Yau compactifications, providing explicit constructions and applications to warped compactifications and D-brane instantons.

Contribution

It offers two explicit dual Calabi-Yau constructions, one monodromy-based and one algebro-geometric, enhancing understanding of flux/geometry duality in string theory.

Findings

Explicit monodromy-based Calabi-Yau duals constructed.

Algebro-geometric description using Jacobian tori of genus-2 curves.

Potential applications to warped compactifications and heterotic model building.

Abstract

In previous work, it was argued that the type IIB T^6/Z_2 orientifold with a choice of flux preserving N=2 supersymmetry is dual to a class of purely geometric type IIA compactifications on abelian surface (T^4) fibered Calabi-Yau threefolds. We provide two explicit constructions of the resulting Calabi-Yau duals. The first is a monodromy based description, analogous to F-theory encoding of Calabi-Yau geometry via 7-branes and string junctions, except for T^4 rather than T^2 fibers. The second is an explicit algebro-geometric construction in which the T^4 fibers arise as the Jacobian tori of a family of genus-2 curves. This improved description of the duality map will be a useful tool to extend our understanding of warped compactifications. We sketch applications to related work to define warped Kaluza-Klein reduction in toroidal orientifolds, and to check the modified rules for D-brane instanton zero mode counting due to the presence of flux and other D-branes. The nontrivial fundamental groups of the Calabi-Yau manifolds constructed also have potential applications to heterotic model building.