Tuesday, March 8, 2022

What are Flux Compactifications?

Following is the bibliographic discussion of Flux Compactification chapter of the the book Becker-Becker-Schwarz:
 
 
Flux compacti cations were introduced in Strominger (1986) and De Wit, Smit and Hari Dass (1987) as a generalization of conventional Calabi-Yau compacti fications. Such compacti fications include a warp factor, so that the ten-dimensional metric is no longer a direct product of the external and internal space-time. No-go theorems implied that in most cases such theories reduce to ordinary Calabi-Yau compacti fications. However, with the development of non-perturbative string theory and M-theory, it became evident
that the no-go theorems could be circumvented. Flux compacti fications were fi rst studied in the context of M-theory in Becker and Becker (1996) and in the context of F-theory in Dasgupta, Rajesh and Sethi (1999). Giddings, Kachru and Polchinski (2002) explained how flux compacti fications can give a large hierarchy of scales. Gra~na (2006) reviews flux compacti fications. Gukov, Vafa and Witten (2001) made it evident that flux compactifi cations can lead to a solution of the moduli-space problem, since a non-vanishing
potential for the moduli fi elds is generated. This led to the introduction of the string theory landscape, which describes a huge number of possible string theory vacua, in Susskind (2003). Their properties were analyzed in Douglas (2003) using statistical methods. Flux compacti fications are dual supergravity descriptions of con ning gauge theories, as was pointed out in Klebanov and Strassler (2000) and Polchinski and Strassler (2000). The idea that a brane-world scenario provides an alternative to compactifi cation was introduced in Randall and Sundrum (1999b).
The application of flux compacti cations to cosmology is an active area of research. Kachru, Kallosh, Linde and Trivedi (2003) discussed the construction of long-lived metastable de Sitter vacua, and Kachru, Kallosh, Linde, Maldacena, McAllister and Trivedi (2003) discussed the application to in-ation. Review articles on string cosmology include Linde (1999), Quevedo (2002) and Danielsson (2005).