Astronomy (Sep 2023)
Emergent Strings at an Infinite Distance with Broken Supersymmetry
Abstract
We investigate the infinite-distance properties of families of unstable flux vacua in string theory with broken supersymmetry. To this end, we employ a generalized notion of distance in the moduli space and we build a holographic description for the non-perturbative regime of the tunneling cascade in terms of a renormalization group flow. In one limit, we recover an exponentially-light tower of Kaluza-Klein states, while in the opposite limit, we find a tower of higher-spin excitations of D1-branes, realizing the emergent string proposal. In particular, the holographic description includes a free sector, whose emergent superconformal symmetry resonates with supersymmetric stability, the CFT distance conjecture and S-duality. We compute the anomalous dimensions of scalar vertex operators and single-trace higher-spin currents, finding an exponential suppression with the distance which is not generic from the renormalization group perspective, but appears specific to our settings.
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