Center Symmetry Breaking in Calabi--Yau Compactifications

Abstract

It is widely believed that global symmetries must be broken in Quantum Gravity. This includes higher-form symmetries, which are commonplace in supergravity coupled to vector multiplets. Recently, a quantitative criterion for the breaking of (higher-form) symmetries in effective field theories of gravity has been proposed. We studied this criterion in the context of center one-form symmetries broken by BPS states in Calabi--Yau compactifications of type IIA string theory and M-theory. In a simple toy model, we evaluated the parameters quantifying the extent of symmetry breaking for large and small values of the moduli, comparing the scales of significant breaking with other relevant physical scales.

24 pages, 4 figures. Invited contribution to the special issue "Symmetries, and Symmetry Breaking in String Theory" in Symmetry. Published version

References in corpus (13)

• Generalized Global Symmetries
• Symmetries and Strings in Field Theory and Gravity
• The Swampland: Introduction and Review
• Lectures on the Swampland Program in String Compactifications
• Black Hole Bound on the Number of Species and Quantum Gravity at LHC
• The Weak Gravity Conjecture: A Review
• Generalized Symmetry Breaking Scales and Weak Gravity Conjectures
• The Emergence Proposal in Quantum Gravity and the Species Scale
• Moduli-dependent Species Scale
• On the Holographic Dual of a Topological Symmetry Operator
• Quantization of Axion-Gauge Couplings and Non-Invertible Higher Symmetries
• Estimating global charge violating amplitudes from wormholes
• Categorical Symmetry of the Standard Model from Gravitational Anomaly