Orientiholes

TL;DR

This paper introduces orientiholes, black hole bound states in orientifold compactifications, linking their properties to the landscape of string vacua and providing new insights into D-brane physics and wall crossing phenomena.

Contribution

It presents the concept of orientiholes, explores their physical properties, and relates them to the string landscape, wall crossing formulas, and topological string theory.

Findings

Orientiholes are black hole bound states in orientifold backgrounds.

Their entropy estimates the number of string vacua.

They generalize wall crossing formulas and relate to topological string theory.

Abstract

By T-dualizing space-filling D-branes in IIB orientifold compactifications along the three non-internal spatial directions, we obtain black hole bound states living in a universe with a gauged spatial reflection symmetry. We call these objects orientiholes. The gravitational entropy of various IIA orientihole configurations provides an "experimental" estimate of the number of vacua in various sectors of the IIB landscape. Furthermore, basic physical properties of orientiholes map to (sometimes subtle) microscopic features, thus providing a useful alternative viewpoint on a number of issues arising in D-brane model building. More generally, we give orientihole generalizations of recently derived wall crossing formulae, and conjecture a relation to the topological string analogous to the OSV conjecture, but with a linear rather than a quadratic identification of partition functions.