# The bosonic string on string-size tori from double field theory

## TL;DR

This paper develops an effective action for bosonic string theory compactified on tori using double field theory, capturing gauge symmetries and mass spectra near points of symmetry enhancement.

## Contribution

It introduces a framework that incorporates enhanced gauge symmetries into double field theory for toroidal compactifications, unifying the description of moduli space and symmetry breaking.

## Key findings

- Reproduces correct mass spectra near enhancement points
- Unifies moduli space description via higher-dimensional tori
- Analyzes specific $T^2$ example with $SU(3)_L \times SU(3)_R$ symmetry

## Abstract

We construct the effective action for toroidal compactifications of bosonic string theory from generalized Scherk-Schwarz reductions of double field theory. The enhanced gauge symmetry arising at special points in moduli space is incorporated into this framework by promoting the $O(k,k)$ duality group of $k$-tori compactifications to $O(n,n)$, $n$ being the dimension of the enhanced gauge group, which allows to account for the full massless sector of the theory. We show that the effective action reproduces the right masses of scalar and vector fields when moving sligthly away from the points of maximal symmetry enhancement. The neighborhood of the enhancement points in moduli space can be neatly explored by spontaneous symmetry breaking. We generically discuss toroidal compactifications of arbitrary dimensions and maximally enhanced gauge groups, and then inspect more closely the example of $T^2$ at the $SU(3)_L \times SU(3)_R$ point, which is the simplest setup containing all the non trivialities of the generic case. We show that the entire moduli space can be described in a unified way by considering compactifications on higher dimensional tori.