Compactifications of Heterotic Strings on Non-Kahler Complex Manifolds: II

Abstract

We continue our study of heterotic compactifications on non-Kahler complex manifolds with torsion. We give further evidence of the consistency of the six-dimensional manifold presented earlier and discuss the anomaly cancellation and possible supergravity description for a generic non-Kahler complex manifold using the newly proposed superpotential. The manifolds studied in our earlier papers had zero Euler characteristics. We construct new examples of non-Kahler complex manifolds with torsion in lower dimensions, that have non-zero Euler characteristics. Some of these examples are constructed from consistent backgrounds in F-theory and therefore are solutions to the string equations of motion. We discuss consistency conditions for compactifications of the heterotic string on smooth non-Kahler manifolds and illustrate how some results well known for Calabi-Yau compactifications, including counting the number of generations, apply to the non-Kahler case. We briefly address various issues regarding possible phenomenological applications.

106 pages, 8 .eps figures, Harvmac; v2: Some sections expanded, typos corrected and references updated; v3: More typos corrected, one section expanded and references added. Final version to appear in Nucl. Phys. B