We consider F-theory compactifications on genus-one fibered Calabi-Yau manifolds with their fibers realized as hypersurfaces in the toric varieties associated to the 16 reflexive 2D polyhedra. We present a base-independent analysis of the codimension one, two and three singularities of these fibrations. We use these geometric results to determine the gauge groups, matter representations, 6D matter multiplicities and 4D Yukawa couplings of the corresponding effective theories. All these theories have a non-trivial gauge group and matter content. We explore the network of Higgsings relating these theories. Such Higgsings geometrically correspond to extremal transitions induced by blow-ups in the 2D toric varieties. We recover the 6D effective theories of all 16 toric hypersurface fibrations by repeatedly Higgsing the theories that exhibit Mordell-Weil torsion. We find that the three Calabi-Yau manifolds without section, whose fibers are given by the toric hypersurfaces in P 2 , P 1 × P 1 and the recently studied P 2 (1, 1, 2), yield F-theory realizations of SUGRA theories with discrete gauge groups Z 3 , Z 2 and Z 4 . This opens up a whole new arena for model building with discrete global symmetries in F-theory. In these three manifolds, we also find codimension two I 2 -fibers supporting matter charged only under these discrete gauge groups. Their 6D matter multiplicities are computed employing ideal techniques and the associated Jacobian fibrations. We also show that the Jacobian of the biquadric fibration has one rational section, yielding one U(1)-gauge field in F-theory. Furthermore, the elliptically fibered Calabi-Yau manifold based on dP 1 has a U(1)-gauge field JHEP01 (2015)142 induced by a non-toric rational section. In this model, we find the first F-theory realization of matter with U(1)-charge q = 3.

We construct four-dimensional, globally consistent F-theory models with three chiral generations, whose gauge group and matter representations coincide with those of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model, the Pati-Salam Model and the Trinification Model. These models result from compactification on toric hypersurface fibrations X with the choice of base P 3 . We observe that the F-theory conditions on the G 4 -flux restrict the number of families to be at least three. We comment on the phenomenology of the models, and for Pati-Salam and Trinification models discuss the Higgsing to the Standard Model. A central point of this work is the construction of globally consistent G 4 -flux. For this purpose we compute the vertical cohomology H (2,2) V (X) in each case and solve the conditions imposed by matching the M-and F-theoretical 3D Chern-Simons terms. We explicitly check that the expressions found for the G 4 -flux allow for a cancellation of D3-brane tadpoles. We also use the integrality of 3D Chern-Simons terms to ensure that our G 4 -flux solutions are adequately quantized.

We explore 6-dimensional compactifications of F-theory exhibiting (2, 0) superconformal theories coupled to gravity that include discretely charged superconformal matter. Beginning with F-theory geometries with Abelian gauge fields and superconformal sectors, we provide examples of Higgsing transitions which break the U(1) gauge symmetry to a discrete remnant in which the matter fields are also non-trivially coupled to a (2, 0) SCFT. In the compactification background this corresponds to a geometric transition linking two fibered Calabi-Yau geometries defined over a singular base complex surface. An elliptically fibered Calabi-Yau threefold with non-zero Mordell-Weil rank can be connected to a smooth non-simply connected genus one fibered geometry constructed as a Calabi-Yau quotient. These hyperconifold transitions exhibit multiple fibers in co-dimension 2 over the base.

We give further evidence that genus-one fibers with multi-sections are mirror dual to fibers with Mordell-Weil torsion. In the physics of F-theory compactifications this implies a relation between models with a non-simply connected gauge group and those with discrete symmetries. We provide a combinatorial explanation of this phenomenon for toric hypersurfaces. In particular this leads to a criterion to deduce Mordell-Weil torsion directly from the polytope. For all 3134 complete intersection genus-one curves in threedimensional toric ambient spaces we confirm the conjecture by explicit calculation. We comment on several new features of these models: the Weierstrass forms of many models can be identified by relabeling the coefficient sections. This reduces the number of models to 1024 inequivalent ones. We give an example of a fiber which contains only non-toric sections one of which becomes toric when the fiber is realized in a different ambient space. Similarly a singularity in codimension one can have a toric resolution in one representation while it is non-toric in another. Finally we give a list of 24 inequivalent genus-one fibers that simultaneously exhibit multi-sections and Mordell-Weil torsion in the Jacobian. We discuss a self-mirror example from this list in detail.

Using F-theory we construct 4D N = 1 SUGRA theories with the Standard Model gauge group, three chiral generations, and matter parity in order to forbid all dimension four baryon and lepton number violating operators. The underlying geometries are derived by constructing smooth genus-one fibered Calabi-Yau fourfolds using toric tops that have a Jacobian fibration with rank one Mordell-Weil group and SU (3)×SU (2) singularities. The necessary gauge backgrounds on the smooth fourfolds are shown to be fully compatible with the quantization condition, including positive integer D3-tadpoles. This construction realizes for the first time a consistent UV completion of an MSSM-like model with matter parity in F-theory. Moreover our construction is general enough to also exhibit other relevant Z 2 charge extensions of the MSSM such as lepton and baryon parity. Such models however are rendered inconsistent by non-integer fluxes, which are necessary for producing the exact MSSM chiral spectrum. These inconsistencies turn out to be intimately related to field theory considerations regarding a UV-embedding of the Z 2 into a U (1) and the resulting discrete anomalies.

Six-dimensional $$ \mathcal{N} $$ N = (1, 0) superconformal field theories can be engineered geometrically via F-theory on elliptically-fibered Calabi-Yau 3-folds. We include torsional sections in the geometry, which lead to a finite Mordell-Weil group. This allows us to identify the full non-Abelian group structure rather than just the algebra. The presence of torsion also modifies the center of the symmetry groups and the matter representations that can appear. This in turn affects the tensor branch of these theories. We analyze this change for a large class of superconformal theories with torsion and explicitly construct their tensor branches. Finally, we elaborate on the connection to the dual heterotic and M-theory description, in which our configurations are interpreted as generalizations of discrete holonomy instantons.

In this work we prove a bound for the torsion in Mordell-Weil groups of smooth elliptically fibered Calabi-Yau 3-and 4-folds. In particular, we show that the set which can occur on a smooth elliptic Calabi-Yau n-fold for (n ≥ 3) is contained in the set of subgroups which appear on a rational elliptic surface, and is slightly larger for n = 2. The key idea in our proof is showing that any elliptic fibration with sufficiently large torsion has singularities in codimension 2 which do not admit a crepant resolution. We prove this by explicitly constructing and studying maps to a modular curve whose existence is predicted by a universal property. We use the geometry of modular curves to explain the minimal singularities that appear on an elliptic fibration with prescribed torsion, and to determine the degree of the fundamental line bundle (hence the Kodaira dimension) of the universal elliptic surface which we show to be consistent with explicit Weierstrass models. The constraints from the modular curves are used to bound the fundamental group of any gauge group G in a supergravity theory obtained from F-theory. We comment on the isolated 8-dimensional theories, obtained from extremal K3's, that are able to circumvent lower dimensional bounds. These theories neither have a heterotic dual, nor can they be compactified to lower dimensional minimal SUGRA theories. We also comment on the maximal, discrete gauged symmetries obtained from certain Calabi-Yau threefold quotients.

In this work we consider quotients of elliptically fibered Calabi-Yau threefolds by freely acting discrete groups and the associated physics of F-theory compactifications on such backgrounds. The process of quotienting a Calabi-Yau geometry produces not only new genus one fibered manifolds, but also new effective 6-dimensional physics. These theories can be uniquely characterized by the much simpler covering space geometry and the symmetry action on it. We use this method to construct examples of F-theory models with an array of discrete gauge groups and non-trivial monodromies, including an example with 1. ∆h 1,1 = 0: Gauge symmetry and number of (1, 0) tensors is unchanged.