Discrete Wilson Lines in F-Theory.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Advances in High Energy Physics Volume 2011, Article ID 404691, 18 pages doi:10.1155/2011/404691 Research Article Discrete Wilson Lines in F-Theory Volker Braun School of Theoretical Physics, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 10 Burlington Road, Dublin 4, Ireland Correspondence should be addressed to Volker Braun, vbraun@stp.dias.ie Received 15 May 2011; Accepted 3 July 2011 Academic Editor: Yang-Hui He Copyright q 2011 Volker Braun. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. F-theory models are constructed where the 7-brane has a nontrivial fundamental group. The base manifolds used are a toric Fano variety and a smooth toric threefold coming from a reflexive polyhedron. The discriminant locus of the elliptically fibered Calabi-Yau fourfold can be chosen such that one irreducible component is not simply connected namely, an Enriques surface and supports a non-Abelian gauge theory. 1. Introduction F-theory 1 is a way to use geometry as a tool to understand certain compactifications of string theory that are otherwise not entirely geometric 2. It uses an auxiliary elliptically fibered Calabi-Yau fourfold, not to be confused with the space-time manifold to study string theory in a regime away from any known weakly coupled perturbative description. Recently 3, 4 a particular model building Ansatz has been suggested where the GUT gauge group arises from a 7-brane wrapped on a contractible del Pezzo surface. Various models 5–10 and more have been constructed along these lines. One key feature of this Ansatz is that the scales of gravity and gauge physics can be decoupled as one can decompactify the Calabi