Search for: All records

A<sc>bstract</sc> Calabi-Yau compactifications have typically a large number of complex structure and/or Kähler moduli that have to be stabilised in phenomenologically-relevant vacua. The former can in principle be done by fluxes in type IIB solutions. However, the tadpole conjecture proposes that the number of stabilised moduli can at most grow linearly with the tadpole charge of the fluxes required for stabilisation. We scrutinise this conjecture in the 2⁶Gepner model: a non-geometric background mirror dual to a rigid Calabi-Yau manifold, in the deep interior of moduli space. By constructing an extensive set of supersymmetric Minkowski flux solutions, we spectacularly confirm the linear growth, while achieving a slightly higher ratio of stabilised moduli to flux charge than the conjectured upper bound. As a byproduct, we obtain for the first time a set of solutions within the tadpole bound where all complex structure moduli are massive. Since the 2⁶model has no Kähler moduli, these show that the massless Minkowski conjecture does not hold beyond supergravity. 

A bstract D7-brane moduli are stabilized by worldvolume fluxes, which contribute to the D3-brane tadpole. We calculate this contribution in the Type IIB limit of F-theory compactifications on Calabi-Yau four-folds with a weak Fano base, and are able to prove a no-go theorem for vast swathes of the landscape of compactifications. When the genus of the curve dual to the D7 worldvolume fluxes is fixed and the number of moduli grows, we find that the D3 charge sourced by the fluxes grows faster than 7/16 of the number of moduli, which supports the Tadpole Conjecture of ref. [1]. Our lower bound for the induced D3 charge decreases when the genus of the curves dual to the stabilizing fluxes increase, and does not allow to rule out a sliver of flux configurations dual to high-genus high-degree curves. However, we argue that most of these fluxes have very high curvature, which is likely to be above the string scale except on extremely large (and experimentally ruled out) compactification manifolds.