Rational points in the 6d supergravity landscape and simple current extensions

TL;DR

This paper explores a special class of 6D supergravity theories with rational superconformal field theories describing their BPS strings, revealing new constraints and insights into their gauge groups and spectra.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach using rationality constraints to analyze supergravity models without geometric F-theory realizations.

Findings

Rationality constraints determine the elliptic genus of BPS strings.

The worldsheet algebra is extended by higher-spin currents, indicating discrete symmetries.

The global gauge group structure is explicitly determined for all models.

Abstract

We investigate a recently identified class of six-dimensional supergravities without tensor multiplets whose primitive BPS strings are described by a rational superconformal field theory. Rationality imposes severe constraints on the supersymmetric spectrum of their BPS strings and provides an effective way to study this class of models, despite the absence of a conventional geometric realization within F-theory. We find that, in each model, the rationality constraints are nontrivially satisfied and uniquely determine the elliptic genus of the strings, providing a new consistency criterion satisfied by this exotic class of candidate quantum gravity theories. In all cases, the left-moving Kac-Moody-Virasoro algebra on the string worldsheet is extended by higher-spin currents, corresponding to discrete symmetries of the 2d SCFT. This allows us to determine the global form of the six-dimensional gauge group for all the members of this class of models.