Heterotic Resolved Conifolds with Torsion, from Supergravity to CFT

TL;DR

This paper constructs and analyzes a family of heterotic supergravity backgrounds with non-Kahler warped conifolds, providing exact worldsheet CFT descriptions and insights into their holographic duals and non-perturbative effects.

Contribution

It introduces new exact heterotic string solutions on warped resolved orbifoldized conifolds with flux and torsion, linking supergravity, CFT, and holography.

Findings

Exact heterotic string backgrounds with flux and torsion.

Worldsheet CFT descriptions of warped resolved conifolds.

Insights into holographic duals and non-perturbative effects.

Abstract

We obtain a family of heterotic supergravity backgrounds describing non-Kahler warped conifolds with three-form flux and an Abelian gauge bundle, preserving N=1 supersymmetry in four dimensions. At large distance from the singularity the usual Ricci-flat conifold is recovered. By performing a Z_2 orbifold of the T^{1,1} base, the conifold singularity can be blown-up to a four-cycle, leading to a completely smooth geometry. Remarkably, the throat regions of the solutions, which can be isolated from the asymptotic Ricci-flat geometry using a double-scaling limit, possess a worldsheet CFT description in terms of heterotic cosets whose target space is the warped resolved orbifoldized conifold. Thus this construction provides exact solutions of the modified Bianchi identity. By solving algebraically these CFTs we compute the exact tree-level heterotic string spectrum and describe worldsheet non-perturbative effects. The holographic dual of these solutions, in particular their confining behavior, and the embedding of these fluxed singularities into heterotic compactifications with torsion are also discussed.