Non-supersymmetric D-branes with Vanishing Cylinder Amplitudes in Asymmetric Orbifolds

Abstract

We study the type II string vacua with chiral space-time SUSY constructed as asymmetric orbifolds of torus and $K3$ compactifications. Despite the fact that all the D-branes are non-BPS in any chiral SUSY vacua, we show that the relevant non-geometric vacua of asymmetric orbifolds allow rather generally configurations of D-branes which lead to vanishing cylinder amplitudes, implying the bose-fermi cancellation at each mass level of the open string spectrum. After working on simple models of toroidal asymmetric orbifolds, we focus on the asymmetric orbifolds of $T^2\times \mathcal{M}$, where $\mathcal{M}$ is described by a general $\mathcal{N}=4$ SCFT with $c=6$ defined by the Gepner construction for $K3$. Even when the modular invariant partition functions in the bulk remain unchanged, the spectra of such non-BPS D-branes with the bose-fermi cancellation can vary significantly according to the choice of orbifolding.

32 pages, no figures; (v2) comments and discussion added on properties of D-branes