Heterotic compactifications with principal bundles for general groups and general levels

TL;DR

This paper develops a general framework for heterotic string compactifications with arbitrary principal bundles, overcoming limitations of traditional constructions that only realize certain E8 gauge fields, and connects to recent elliptic genus results.

Contribution

It introduces fibered WZW models enabling heterotic strings to incorporate general gauge groups and levels, broadening the scope of gauge field realizations in string theory.

Findings

Constructed a method to build E8 partition functions from various subgroups.

Developed fibered WZW models coupling general groups and levels to heterotic strings.

Provided a physical realization of recent elliptic genus constructions.

Abstract

We examine to what extent heterotic string worldsheets can describe arbitrary E8xE8 gauge fields. The traditional construction of heterotic strings builds each E8 via a Spin(16)/Z2 subgroup, typically realized as a current algebra by left-moving fermions, and as a result, only E8 gauge fields reducible to Spin(16)/Z2 gauge fields are directly realizable in standard constructions. However, there exist perturbatively consistent E8 gauge fields which can not be reduced to Spin(16)/Z2, and so cannot be described within standard heterotic worldsheet constructions. A natural question to then ask is whether there exists any (0,2) SCFT that can describe such E8 gauge fields. To answer this question, we first show how each ten-dimensional E8 partition function can be built up using other subgroups than Spin(16)/Z2, then construct ``fibered WZW models'' which allow us to explicitly couple current algebras for general groups and general levels to heterotic strings. This technology gives us a very general approach to handling heterotic compactifications with arbitrary principal bundles. It also gives us a physical realization of some elliptic genera constructed recently by Ando and Liu.