IIB Explored: Reflection 7-Branes

Abstract

The Swampland Cobordism Conjecture successfully predicts the supersymmetric spectrum of 7-branes of IIB / F-theory. Including reflections on the F-theory torus, it also predicts the existence of new non-supersymmetric objects, which we dub reflection 7-branes (R7-branes). We present evidence that these R7-branes only exist at strong coupling. R7-branes serve as end of the world branes for 9D theories obtained from type IIB asymmetric orbifold and Dabholkar-Park orientifold backgrounds, and an anomaly inflow analysis suggests the existence of a gapless Weyl fermion, which would have the quantum numbers of a goldstino. Using general arguments, we conclude that different kinds of branes are able to end on the R7, and accounting for their charge requires exotic localized degrees of freedom, for which the simplest possibility is a massless 3-form field on the R7-brane worldvolume. We also show how to generalize the standard F-theory formalism to account for reflections.

v2: 45 pages, 3 figures, typos corrected, reference added

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• Hitchhiker's Guide to the Swampland: The Cosmologist's Handbook to the string-theoretical Swampland Programme
• Morse-Bott inequalities, Topology Change and Cobordisms to Nothing
• Gravitational Background of Alice-Vortices and R7-Branes