New Attractors

TL;DR

The paper extends the attractor mechanism from black holes to type IIB flux vacua, deriving algebraic attractor equations that relate fluxes to fixed moduli in CY orientifolds. A novel term proportional to the chiral fermion mass matrix $M_{AB}$ appears, allowing moduli stabilization even at vanishing gravitino mass $M_{3/2}$ and enabling a consistent description of non-supersymmetric cases. It unifies the BH and flux vacua formalisms via special geometry and a Hodge-decomposition approach, and provides explicit examples including an M-theory on K3×K3 instance and a generalized framework for $M_{AB}\neq 0$. The work also extends the attractor construction to non-supersymmetric black holes and flux vacua, broadening the landscape of stabilized flux configurations and potential uplifting scenarios.

Abstract

We derive new algebraic attractor equations describing supersymmetric flux vacua of type IIB string theory. The first term in these equations, proportional to the gravitino mass (the central charge), is similar to the attractor equations for moduli fixed by the charges near the horizon of the supersymmetric black holes. The second term does not have a counterpart in the theory of black hole attractors. It is proportional to a mass matrix mixing axino-dilatino with complex structure modulino. This allows stabilization of moduli for vanishing central charge, which was not possible for BPS black holes. Finally, we propose a new set of attractor equations for non-supersymmetric black holes and for non-supersymmetric flux vacua.