Unstable magnetic fluxes in heterotic string theory

TL;DR

This paper investigates unstable magnetic flux backgrounds in heterotic string theory, identifying tachyonic instabilities and their decay to flat space, using supergravity, world sheet RG equations, and duality arguments.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of magnetic flux backgrounds in heterotic strings, identifying tachyonic instabilities and their decay mechanisms through supergravity and duality methods.

Findings

Localized closed string tachyons signal background decay.

The magnetic flux backgrounds are stable against pair production.

Tachyons correspond to open string tachyons in the S-dual type I theory.

Abstract

We study exact string backgrounds representing a constant magnetic field background in heterotic string theory. These backgrounds are obtained by Kaluza-Klein reduction of a special class of plane wave solutions. For small values of the magnetic field they possess localized closed string tachyons analogous to the Nielsen-Olesen instability of a constant magnetic field in SO(3) Yang-Mills theory. When the magnetic field is embedded in the SO(32) gauge group of the heterotic string it is possible to study the lowest level tachyon in supergravity. We identify the closed string tachyons as fluctuations of the supergravity fields about the background. We argue that the tachyon signals the decay of the background to flat space. Our evidence rests on the study of the closed string tachyon potential, world sheet renormalization group equations in the supergravity approximation and the S-dual of this system in type I theory. In the S-dual description, the closed string tachyons in heterotic string theory correspond to open string tachyons in type I theory. Finally we analyze the non-perturbative stability of these models representing constant magnetic field backgrounds and show that it is stable to pair production of particles.