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mitchell porter
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This paper presents an unusually concrete hypothesis about the string theory landscape - that it is numerically dominated by "flux vacua" arising from a single compactification manifold. And our world could be one of them.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.03209
The F-theory geometry with most flux vacua
Washington Taylor, Yi-Nan Wang
(Submitted on 10 Nov 2015)
Applying the Ashok-Denef-Douglas estimation method to elliptic Calabi-Yau fourfolds suggests that a single elliptic fourfold ##{\cal M}_{\rm max}## gives rise to ##{\cal O} (10^{272,000})## F-theory flux vacua, and that the sum total of the numbers of flux vacua from all other F-theory geometries is suppressed by a relative factor of ##{\cal O} (10^{-3000})##. The fourfold ##{\cal M}_{\rm max}## arises from a generic elliptic fibration over a specific toric threefold base ##B_{\rm max}##, and gives a geometrically non-Higgsable gauge group of ##E_8^9 \times F_4^8 \times (G_2 \times SU(2))^{16}##, of which we expect some factors to be broken by G-flux to smaller groups. It is not possible to tune an ##SU(5)## GUT group on any further divisors in ##{\cal M}_{\rm max}##, or even an ##SU(2)## or ##SU(3)##, so the standard model gauge group appears to arise in this context only from a broken ##E_8## factor. The results of this paper can either be interpreted as providing a framework for predicting how the standard model arises most naturally in F-theory and the types of dark matter to be found in a typical F-theory compactification, or as a challenge to string theorists to explain why other choices of vacua are not exponentially unlikely compared to F-theory compactifications on ##{\cal M}_{\rm max}##.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.03209
The F-theory geometry with most flux vacua
Washington Taylor, Yi-Nan Wang
(Submitted on 10 Nov 2015)
Applying the Ashok-Denef-Douglas estimation method to elliptic Calabi-Yau fourfolds suggests that a single elliptic fourfold ##{\cal M}_{\rm max}## gives rise to ##{\cal O} (10^{272,000})## F-theory flux vacua, and that the sum total of the numbers of flux vacua from all other F-theory geometries is suppressed by a relative factor of ##{\cal O} (10^{-3000})##. The fourfold ##{\cal M}_{\rm max}## arises from a generic elliptic fibration over a specific toric threefold base ##B_{\rm max}##, and gives a geometrically non-Higgsable gauge group of ##E_8^9 \times F_4^8 \times (G_2 \times SU(2))^{16}##, of which we expect some factors to be broken by G-flux to smaller groups. It is not possible to tune an ##SU(5)## GUT group on any further divisors in ##{\cal M}_{\rm max}##, or even an ##SU(2)## or ##SU(3)##, so the standard model gauge group appears to arise in this context only from a broken ##E_8## factor. The results of this paper can either be interpreted as providing a framework for predicting how the standard model arises most naturally in F-theory and the types of dark matter to be found in a typical F-theory compactification, or as a challenge to string theorists to explain why other choices of vacua are not exponentially unlikely compared to F-theory compactifications on ##{\cal M}_{\rm max}##.
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