Flux vacua: A voluminous recount

TL;DR

This paper applies mathematical techniques to estimate the number of flux vacua in specific Calabi-Yau compactifications, revealing how geometric factors influence flux counting in string theory.

Contribution

It introduces a method to incorporate geometric factors into flux vacua counting, providing estimates for models like FHSV and analyzing moduli space volume dependence.

Findings

Geometric factors significantly affect flux vacua counts.

Flux vacua estimates depend on Calabi-Yau Betti numbers.

Moduli space volume varies with flux space dimension.

Abstract

In this note we apply mathematical results for the volume of certain symmetric spaces to the problem of counting flux vacua in simple IIB Calabi--Yau compactifications. In particular we obtain estimates for the number of flux vacua including the geometric factor related to the Calabi-Yau moduli space, in the large flux limit, for the FHSV model and some closely related models. We see that these geometric factors give rise to contributions to the counting formula that are typically not of order one and might potentially affect the counting qualitatively in some cases. We also note, for simple families of Calabi-Yau moduli spaces, an interesting dependence of the moduli space volumes on the dimension of the flux space, which in turn is governed by the Betti numbers of the Calabi-Yaus.