Vacua with Small Flux Superpotential

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to identify flux vacua in type IIB string theory with an exponentially small superpotential, exemplified by a specific Calabi-Yau orientifold with very small W0.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach for finding flux vacua with tiny superpotentials in type IIB string theory, including a concrete example with W0 around 2×10^{-8}.

Findings

Successfully found a flux vacuum with W0 ≈ 2×10^{-8}.

Demonstrated the method on a Calabi-Yau hypersurface at large complex structure.

Showed the vacuum exists at weak string coupling.

Abstract

We describe a method for finding flux vacua of type IIB string theory in which the Gukov-Vafa-Witten superpotential is exponentially small. We present an example with $W_0 \approx 2 \times 10^{-8}$ on an orientifold of a Calabi-Yau hypersurface with $(h^{1,1},h^{2,1})=(2,272)$, at large complex structure and weak string coupling.