Heterotic-type IIA duality with fluxes

TL;DR

The paper investigates a generalized non-perturbative duality between the heterotic string on $K3\times T^2$ with background fluxes and Type IIA string theory on manifolds with $SU(3)$ structure. By deriving the 4D $N=2$ effective actions on both sides and identifying covariant derivatives and scalar potentials, the authors show that a subset of heterotic fluxes maps to torsion in the IIA compactification, yielding matching Killing vectors and potentials. This provides evidence that non-perturbative dualities persist in flux backgrounds and highlights the role of SU(3) structure and intrinsic torsion in enriching the duality web. The work also clarifies the limitations of the duality (such as partial hypermultiplet matching and a restricted set of fluxes) and motivates further study of torsionful geometries for moduli stabilization and beyond.

Abstract

In this paper we study a possible non-perturbative dual of the heterotic string compactified on K3 x T^2 in the presence of background fluxes. We show that type IIA string theory compactified on manifolds with SU(3) structure can account for a subset of the possible heterotic fluxes. This extends our previous analysis to a case of a non-perturbative duality with fluxes.