Suppressing the Cosmological Constant in Non-Supersymmetric Type I Strings

TL;DR

This paper presents non-supersymmetric type I string models with stable flat-space solutions, where the vacuum energy depends on extra dimensions' size, potentially suppressing the cosmological constant.

Contribution

It introduces a new class of consistent non-supersymmetric type I string models with adjustable vacuum energy and chiral fermions, recovering supersymmetry in the bulk at large radius.

Findings

Vacuum energy fixed by compactification size

Models exhibit non-abelian gauge groups and chiral fermions

Evidence suggests suppression of higher-loop vacuum energy corrections

Abstract

We construct non-supersymmetric type I string models which correspond to consistent flat-space solutions of all classical equations of motion. Moreover, the one-loop vacuum energy is naturally fixed by the size of compact extra dimensions which, in the two-dimensional case, can be lowered to a fraction of a millimetre. This class of models has interesting non-abelian gauge groups and can accommodate chiral fermions. In the large radius limit, supersymmetry is recovered in the bulk, while D-brane excitations, although non-supersymmetric, exhibit Fermi-Bose degeneracy at all mass levels. We also give some evidence for a suppression of higher-loop corrections to the vacuum energy.