The Tadpole Conjecture in the Interior of Moduli Space

TL;DR

This paper investigates the tadpole conjecture in Calabi-Yau moduli spaces, demonstrating that invariant fluxes can stabilize a significant portion of complex structure moduli, challenging the conjecture's bounds in specific cases.

Contribution

It provides a new analysis of moduli stabilization using invariant fluxes on symmetric loci, showing potential to bypass the tadpole conjecture bounds in certain Calabi-Yau fourfolds.

Findings

Invariant fluxes stabilize at least 60% of complex structure moduli.

Small tadpole fluxes can stabilize a large number of moduli, challenging the conjecture.

Example with a Calabi-Yau hypersurface stabilizes 4932 moduli with N_flux=3.

Abstract

We revisit moduli stabilization on Calabi-Yau manifolds with a discrete symmetry. Invariant fluxes allow for a truncation to a symmetric locus in complex structure moduli space and hence drastically reduce the moduli stabilization problem in its dimensionality. This makes them an ideal testing ground for the tadpole conjecture. For a large class of fourfolds, we show that an invariant flux with non-zero on-shell superpotential on the symmetric locus necessarily stabilizes at least 60% of the complex structure moduli. In case this invariant flux induces a relatively small tadpole, it is thus possible to bypass the bound predicted by the tadpole conjecture at these special loci. As an example, we discuss a Calabi-Yau hypersurface with $h^{3,1}=3878$ and show that we can stabilize at least 4932 real moduli with a flux that induces M2-charge $N_\text{flux} =3$.