Heterotic warped Eguchi-Hanson spectra with five-branes and line bundles

TL;DR

This paper analyzes heterotic string spectra on a warped Eguchi-Hanson space with five-branes and line bundles, using exact CFT descriptions and supergravity approximations to understand the spectrum and anomaly cancellation.

Contribution

It provides a novel computation of heterotic string spectra on warped Eguchi-Hanson spaces using both supergravity and CFT methods, establishing a conjectural correspondence between states.

Findings

Agreement between supergravity and CFT spectra supports the conjecture.

Explicit construction of gauge fluxes preserves supersymmetry.

Identification of hyper multiplets in the spectrum.

Abstract

We consider heterotic strings on a warped Eguchi-Hanson space with five-brane and line bundle gauge fluxes. The heterotic string admits an exact CFT description in terms of an asymmetrically gauged SU(2)xSL(2,R) WZW model, in a specific double scaling limit in which the blow-up radius and the string scale are sent to zero simultaneously. This allows us to compute the perturbative 6D spectra for these models in two independent fashions: i) Within the supergravity approximation we employ a representation dependent index; ii) In the double scaling limit we determine all marginal vertex operators of the coset CFT. To achieve agreement between the supergravity and the CFT spectra, we conjecture that the untwisted and the twisted CFT states correspond to the same set of hyper multiplets in supergravity. This is in a similar spirit as a conjectured duality between asymptotically linear dilaton CFTs and little string theory living on NS-five-branes. As the five-brane charge is non-vanishing, heterotic (anti-)five-branes have to be added in order to cancel irreducible gauge anomalies. The local spectra can be combined in such a way that supersymmetry is preserved on the compact resolved T^4/Z_2 orbifold by choosing the local gauge fluxes appropriately.