Particle theory

Abstract:

Symmetric vacua of heterotic M theory, characterized by vanishing cohomology classes of individual sources in the three-form Bianchi identity, are analyzed on smooth Calabi-Yau three-folds. We show that such vacua do not exist for elliptically fibered Calabi-Yau spaces. However, explicit examples are found for Calabi-Yau three-folds arising as intersections in both unweighted and weighted projective space. We show that such symmetric vacua can be combined with attractive phenomenological features such as three generations of quarks and leptons. Properties of the low energy effective actions associated with symmetric vacua are discussed. In particular, the gauge kinetic functions receive no perturbative threshold corrections, there are no corrections to the matter field Kähler metric and the associated five-dimensional effective theory admits flat space as its vacuum.

Abstract:

We develop a gauge-invariant formalism to describe metric perturbations in five-dimensional brane-world theories. In particular, this formalism applies to models originating from heterotic M theory. We introduce a generalized longitudinal gauge for scalar perturbations. In this gauge, we derive the five-dimensional evolution equations for scalar perturbations as well as the most general structure of the scalar brane stress-energy tensor. As an application, we discuss some aspects of the evolution of fluctuations on the brane. Moreover, we show how the five-dimensional formalism can be matched to the known four-dimensional one in the limit where an effective four-dimensional description is appropriate. ©2000 The American Physical Society.