Supersymmetry versus Gauge Symmetry on the Heterotic Landscape

Abstract

One of the goals of the landscape program in string theory is to extract information about the space of string vacua in the form of statistical correlations between phenomenological features that are otherwise uncorrelated in field theory. Such correlations would thus represent predictions of string theory that hold independently of a vacuum-selection principle. In this paper, we study statistical correlations between two features which are likely to be central to any potential description of nature at high energy scales: gauge symmetries and spacetime supersymmetry. We analyze correlations between these two kinds of symmetry within the context of perturbative heterotic string vacua, and find a number of striking features. We find, for example, that the degree of spacetime supersymmetry is strongly correlated with the probabilities of realizing certain gauge groups, with unbroken supersymmetry at the string scale tending to favor gauge-group factors with larger rank. We also find that nearly half of the heterotic landscape is non-supersymmetric and yet tachyon-free at tree level; indeed, less than a quarter of the tree-level heterotic landscape exhibits any supersymmetry at all at the string scale.

29 pages, LaTeX, 4 figures, 7 tables

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• Spinor-Vector Duality in Heterotic SUSY Vacua
• Spinor-Vector Duality in N=2 Heterotic String Vacua
• Geography of Fields in Extra Dimensions: String Theory Lessons for Particle Physics
• Classification of Flipped SU(5) Heterotic-String Vacua
• Stability, enhanced gauge symmetry and suppressed cosmological constant in 9D heterotic interpolating models
• Building a Nest at Tree Level: Classical Metastability and Non-Trivial Vacuum Structure in Supersymmetric Field Theories
• Non-supersymmetric Orientifolds of Gepner Models
• Free Fermion Orientifolds
• Is SUSY Natural?
• Statistics in the Landscape of Intersecting Brane Models
• Phenomenology from the Landscape of String Vacua
• Investigation into Compactified Dimensions: Casimir Energies and Phenomenological Aspects