Abstract:We study the effective physics of F-theory at order α ′ 3 in derivative expansion. We show that the ten-dimensional type IIB eight-derivative couplings involving the graviton and the axio-dilaton naturally descend from pure gravity in twelve dimensions. Upon compactification on elliptically fibered Calabi-Yau fourfolds, the non-trivial vacuum profile for the axio-dilaton leads to a new, genuinely N = 1, α ′ 3 correction to the four-dimensional effective action.

M-theory accessed via eleven-dimensional supergravity admits globally consistent warped solutions with eight-dimensional compact spaces if background fluxes and higher derivative terms are considered. The internal background is conformally Kähler with vanishing first Chern class. We perturb these solutions including a finite number of Kähler deformations of the metric and vector deformations of the M-theory three-form. Special emphasis is given to the field-dependence of the warp-factor and the higher-derivative terms. We show that the three-dimensional two-derivative effective action takes a surprisingly simple form in terms of a single higher-curvature building block due to numerous non-trivial cancellations. Both the ansatz and the effective action admit a moduli dependent scaling symmetry of the internal metric. Furthermore, we find that the required departure from Ricci-flatness and harmonicity of the zero-mode eigenforms does not alter the effective theory.

Abstract:We study the three-dimensional effective action obtained by reducing elevendimensional supergravity with higher-derivative terms on a background solution including a warp-factor, an eight-dimensional compact manifold, and fluxes. The dynamical fields are Kähler deformations and vectors from the M-theory three-form. We show that the potential is only induced by fluxes and the naive contributions obtained from higher-curvature terms on a Calabi-Yau background vanish once the back-reaction to the full solution is taken into account. For the resulting three-dimensional action we analyse the Kähler potential and complex coordinates and show compatibility with N = 2 supersymmetry. We argue that the higher-order result is also compatible with a no-scale condition. We find that the complex coordinates should be formulated as divisor integrals for which a non-trivial interplay between the warp-factor terms and the higher-curvature terms allow a derivation of the moduli space metric. This leads us to discuss higher-derivative corrections to the M5-brane action.

We study solutions to the eleven-dimensional supergravity action, including terms quartic and cubic in the Riemann curvature, that admit an eight-dimensional compact space. The internal background is found to be a conformally Kahler manifold with vanishing first Chern class. The metric solution, however, is non-Ricci-flat even when allowing for a conformal rescaling including the warp factor. This deviation is due to the possible non-harmonicity of the third Chern-form in the leading order Ricci-flat metric. We present a systematic derivation of the background solution by solving the Killing spinor conditions including higher curvature terms. These are translated into first-order differential equations for a globally defined real two-form and complex four-form on the fourfold. We comment on the supersymmetry properties of the described solutions.Comment: 14 page

We propose a novel approach to obtain four-dimensional effective actions coupled to supersymmetry-breaking boundaries by considering F-theory on manifolds with special holonomy Spin(7). To perform such studies we suggest that a duality relating Mtheory on a certain class of Spin(7) manifolds with F-theory on the same manifolds times an interval exists. The Spin(7) geometries under consideration are constructed as quotients of elliptically fibered Calabi-Yau fourfolds by an anti-holomorphic and isometric involution. The three-dimensional minimally supersymmetric effective action of M-theory on a general Spin(7) manifold with fluxes is determined and specialized to the aforementioned geometries. This effective theory is compared with an interval Kaluza-Klein reduction of a non-supersymmetric four-dimensional theory with definite boundary conditions for all fields. Using this strategy a minimal set of couplings of the four-dimensional low-energy effective actions is obtained in terms of the Spin(7) geometric data. We also discuss briefly the string interpretation in the Type IIB weak coupling limit.