N=1 Type IIA brane configurations, Chirality and T-duality

TL;DR

This paper explores the relationship between type IIA brane configurations with chiral matter and their T-dual type IIB descriptions involving D3-branes probing orientifold singularities, revealing new insights into exotic brane dynamics.

Contribution

It explicitly constructs the T-dual type IIB orientifolds of elliptic IIA brane models and demonstrates the equivalence of their associated field theories.

Findings

T-duality maps IIA brane configurations to IIB D3-branes on orientifold singularities.

The IIB description reproduces the IIA field theories, confirming the duality.

Exotic brane effects in IIA have standard counterparts in IIB.

Abstract

We consider four-dimensional N=1 field theories realized by type IIA brane configurations of NS-branes and D4-branes, in the presence of orientifold six-planes and D6-branes. These configurations are known to present interesting effects associated to the appearance of chiral symmetries and chiral matter in the four-dimensional field theory. We center on models with one compact direction (elliptic models) and show that, under T-duality, the configurations are mapped to a set of type IIB D3-branes probing N=1 orientifolds of C^2/Z_N singularities. We explicitly construct these orientifolds, and show the field theories on the D3-brane probes indeed reproduces the field theories constructed using the IIA brane configurations. This T-duality map allows to understand the type IIB realization of several exotic brane dynamics effects on the type IIA side: Flavour doubling, the splitting of D6-branes and O6-planes in crossing a NS-brane and the effect of a non-zero type IIA cosmological constant turn out to have surprisingly standard type IIB counterparts.