The Spectra of Supersymmetric States in String Theory
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The Spectra of Supersymmetric States in String Theory PhD Thesis 2008 University of Amsterdam arXiv:0807.3099v1 [hep-th] 19 Jul 2008 by Miranda Chih-Ning Cheng Contents Preface v I Superstring Theory 1 1 Type IIA and Type IIB Superstring Theory 5 1.1 The World-Sheet Action ............................ 5 1.1.1 Canonical Quantisation ......................... 6 1.1.2 Massless Spectrum ........................... 7 1.1.3 T-Duality ................................. 10 1.2 Low Energy Effective Action ........................... 13 1.2.1 Supergravity Theory in Eleven and Ten Dimensions . 13 1.2.2 Couplings of String Theory ....................... 15 1.3 Non-Perturbative Aspects ............................ 17 1.3.1 M-theory ................................. 17 1.3.2 Branes .................................. 18 1.3.3 D-brane World-Volume Action ...................... 24 1.3.4 Gauge/Gravity Correspondence ..................... 27 1.3.5 S-duality ................................. 28 II String Compactification 33 2 Calabi-Yau Compactifications 37 2.1 (2,2) Superconformal Field Theory ....................... 37 2.1.1 = 2 Superconformal Algebra ..................... 37 N 2.1.2 Chiral Ring ................................ 39 2.1.3 Spectral Flow .............................. 42 2.1.4 Topological String Theory ........................ 43 2.1.5 Elliptic Genus and Vector-Valued Modular Forms . 45 2.1.6 Mirror Symmetry and Non-perturbative Effects ............. 49 2.2 Spacetime Physics ................................ 50 i ii Contents 2.2.1 Moduli Space and Special Geometry . 50 2.2.2 Four- and Five-Dimensional Low Energy Supergravity Theory . 56 2.2.3 Range of Validity and Higher Order Corrections . 62 3 K3 Compactification 65 3.1 (4,4) Superconformal Field Theory ....................... 65 3.2 Moduli Space of K3 ............................... 67 3.3 Four-Dimensional Theories and Heterotic String Dualities . 69 3.3.1 = 4; d = 4 Supergravity ....................... 69 N 3.3.2 Heterotic String Dualities ........................ 71 III Multi-Holes and Bubbling Solutions 73 4 Black Holes and Multi-Holes 77 4.1 General Stationary Solutions ........................... 77 4.2 Extremal Black Holes and Attractor Mechanism . 79 4.3 Properties of Multi-holes ............................. 81 4.3.1 Walls of Marginal Stability ........................ 82 4.3.2 Angular Momentum of the Spacetime . 83 4.3.3 Split Attractor Flow ........................... 84 4.4 In Coordinates .................................. 84 5 More Bubbling Solutions 89 5.1 Introduction ................................... 89 5.2 The Lift of Multi-Center Solutions ........................ 91 5.3 Construct the Bubbling Solutions ........................ 92 5.3.1 M-theory Limit .............................. 92 5.3.2 Rescale the Solution ........................... 93 5.3.3 Specify the 4D Charges ......................... 95 5.4 The Properties of the Solution .......................... 96 5.4.1 The Conserved Charges ......................... 96 5.4.2 The Shape of the Solution . 100 5.4.3 Large gauge Transformation . 106 5.5 Conclusions and Discussion . 107 5.6 Appendix 1: Reproduce the old Bubbling Solutions . 109 5.7 Appendix 2: Constant Terms for General Charges and Background . 110 Contents iii IV A Farey Tail for Attractor Black Holes 113 6 A Farey Tail for Attractor Black Holes 117 6.1 Introduction ...................................117 6.2 Wrapped M-branes and the Near Horizon Limit . 118 6.2.1 Wrapped Branes on Calabi-Yau and the Spectral Flow . 119 6.2.2 The Near-Horizon Geometry and Reduction to Three Dimensions . 123 6.3 The (0,4) Superconformal Field Theory . 125 6.3.1 Counting the Degrees of Freedom . 126 6.3.2 The Universal Sigma Model . 128 6.4 A Generalised Elliptic Genus . 131 6.4.1 The Modified Fermion Number . 131 6.4.2 The Modular Properties . 131 6.4.3 The Theta-Function Decomposition . 132 6.4.4 The (Modern) Farey Tail Expansion . 135 6.5 Spacetime Interpretation of the Attractor Farey Tail . 136 6.5.1 Gravitational Interpretation of the Generalised Rademacher formula . 136 6.5.2 Wrapped M2-branes . 139 6.6 Summary and Conclusion ............................140 V = 4 Dyons 141 N 7 Microscopic Degeneracies and a Counting Formula 145 7.1 Microscopic Degeneracies ............................145 7.1.1 1=2- and 1=4-BPS Solutions . 145 7.1.2 Microscopic Degeneracies of 1=2-BPS States . 146 7.1.3 Microscopic Degeneracies of 1=4-BPS States . 147 7.2 The Counting Formula and a Borcherds-Kac-Moody Algebra . 149 7.2.1 Dyons and the Weyl Group . 149 7.2.2 K3 Elliptic Genus and the Siegel Modular Form . 153 7.2.3 The Borcherds-Kac-Moody Superalgebra and the Denominator Formula 157 8 Counting the Dying Dyons 161 8.1 Introduction ...................................161 8.2 Dying Dyons and Walls of Marginal Stability . 162 8.2.1 Determining the Walls . 162 8.2.2 Stability Conditions from Supergravity Solutions . 166 8.3 Contour Dependence of the Counting Formula . 168 8.4 The Contour Prescription and its Interpretation . 173 iv Contents 8.4.1 A Contour Prescription . 173 8.4.2 The Attractor Contour for Large Charges . 175 8.5 Weyl Chambers and Discrete Attractor Flow Group . 176 8.5.1 Weyl Chamber and Moduli Space . 176 8.5.2 A Hierarchy of Decay . 178 8.5.3 Arithmetic Attractor Flows . 182 8.6 The Algebra and the BPS States . 185 8.6.1 Wall-Crossing and Representations of the Algebra . 185 8.6.2 Microscopic Derivation of the Wall-Crossing Formula . 187 8.7 Summary and Conclusion ............................190 8.8 Appendix: Properties of Coxeter Groups . 191 A Mathematical Preliminaries 195 Bibliography 203 Index 211 Preface The goals of the thesis, apart from for the author to become a doctor, are the following: 1. To summarise the main results of my research of the past three years. 2. To provide a compact and self-contained survey of the relevant materials for beginning graduate students or researchers in other sub-fields as a shortcut to the frontline of the current research in this area of string theory. Motivation for the First Goal My personal motivation to pursue this line of research has two sides. First of all, in order to understand the structure of a theory, it is important to know the spectrum of the theory. Just like the spectrum of a hydrogen atom holds the key to understanding quantum mechanics, we hope that the same might be true for string theory. For a very complex theory as string theory is, the supersymmetric part of the spectrum is usually the part which is most accessible to us due to the great simplification supersymmetry offers. Nevertheless, as I hope I will convince the readers in this thesis, it is still a far from trivial task to study this part of the spectrum. In other words, we hope that the study of the spectrum of supersymmetric states of string theory will be a feasible step towards furthering our understanding of string theory. In the other direction, it has been a great challenge since the invention of Einstein gravity and quantum mechanics to understand the quantum aspects of gravity. A fun- damental question since the work of Bekenstein and Hawking in the 70's, is why black holes have entropy. Only when we can answer this question can we ever claim that we understand the nature of quantum gravity. Conversely, because of the challenging nature of the question, once we can answer this question we have a reason to believe that we are on the right track to the goal of quantising, in one way or the other, Einstein gravity. String theory, at the time of writing, still scores highest in the challenge of explaining the thermodynamical entropy of the black holes, while it is also true that most of the work done along this trajectory still focuses on black holes with supersymmetry, which are unlikely to be directly observable in nature. From this point of view, to study the su- persymmetric spectrum of string theory and to use it as information about the black hole entropy, is a part of the effort towards a deeper understanding of the nature of quantum gravity. Motivation for the Second Goal Now I will move on to explain the motivation to achieve the second goal of the thesis: providing a self-contained material serving as a shortcut to the current research on the topic. v vi Preface In the course of development of string theory since its birth in the 70's, it has expanded into an extremely broad and sometimes very complicated field. According Mr. Peter Woit, there might be around 30,000 papers written on the subject so far. While exactly this property makes it, in my opinion, a sufficiently fun field to be working in, it is no good news for beginners. In order to work on a topic in a specific sub-field, she or he is likely to find herself having to go through the labyrinth of a large amount of papers on various totally different but yet somehow inter-connected topics in physics and mathematics, with conflicting notations and conventions. As it could be fairly time-consuming and frustrating a process, I would like to take the chance of writing my PhD thesis to provide a service for anyone who might be able to use it, by making an attempt at a relatively compact and self-contained exposition of some of the should-know's for performing research related to the subjects I have worked on in the past three years. Reader's Manual But the attempt to be self-contained also brings some drawbacks to this thesis, namely that a fair portion of it is probably unnecessary for expert readers only interested in the results of my research. To cure this problem we now give a rough reader's manual so the advanced readers will be less likely finding themselves wasting their time on the introductions. This thesis is organised as follows. In the first part we introduce some basic concepts of superstring theories in 30 pages, focusing on the perturbative aspects in the first section and the non-perturbative aspects in the second.