Gluing Branes II: Flavour Physics and String Duality

Abstract

Recently we discussed new aspects of degenerate brane configurations, which can appear in the context of heterotic strings, perturbative type II, or M/F-theory. Here we continue our study of degenerate brane configurations, focussing on two applications. First we show how the notion of gluing can be viewed as a tool to engineer flavour structures in F-theory and type IIb, such as models with bulk matter and with Yukawa textures arising from the holomorphic zero mechanism. We find that there is in principle enough structure to solve some of the major flavour problems without generating exotics. In particular, we show how this addresses the mu-problem, doublet/triplet splitting and proton decay. Secondly, we describe the Fourier-Mukai transform of heterotic monad constructions, which occur in the large volume limit of heterotic linear sigma model vacua. Degenerate structures again often appear. One may use this to explore strong coupling phenomena using heterotic/F-theory duality.

Figures (2)

• Figure 1: The extended $E_8$ Dynkin diagram and Dynkin indices.
• Figure 2: The curve on which the ${\overline{\bf 5 \!}\,}$ or ${\bf 5}$ matter of an $SU(5)$ GUT propagates has factorized into two pieces, but the modes on these two curves are not independent if the gluing morphism is non-zero. Similarly, modes in the ${\bf 10}$ or ${\overline{\bf 10 \!}\,}$ of $SU(5)$ seem to originate from the bulk or from a matter curve, but are not independent when the gluing morphism is non-zero.