Evidence for F-Theory

TL;DR

This paper constructs examples of D-manifolds for type IIB strings, providing evidence for F-theory as a natural 12-dimensional framework that unifies various string compactifications and offers potential solutions to cosmological issues.

Contribution

It offers a geometric construction of F-theory, linking it to type IIB strings and M-theory compactifications, and explores phenomenologically promising compactifications on special manifolds.

Findings

Constructed compact D-manifolds for type IIB strings.

Established equivalence between M-theory on elliptic manifolds and F-theory on their product with S^1.

Identified promising F-theory compactifications on Spin(7) manifolds for 4D physics.

Abstract

We construct compact examples of D-manifolds for type IIB strings. The construction has a natural interpretation in terms of compactification of a 12 dimensional `F-theory'. We provide evidence for a more natural reformulation of type IIB theory in terms of F-theory. Compactification of M-theory on a manifold $K$ which admits elliptic fibration is equivalent to compactification of F-theory on $K\times S^1$. A large class of $N=1$ theories in 6 dimensions are obtained by compactification of F-theory on Calabi-Yau threefolds. A class of phenomenologically promising compactifications of F-theory is on $Spin(7)$ holonomy manifolds down to 4 dimensions. This may provide a concrete realization of Witten's proposal for solving the cosmological constant problem in four dimensions.