\({\cal N}=2\) heterotic string compactifications on orbifolds of \(K3\times T^2\)

Abstract

We study \({\cal N}=2\) compactifications of \(E_8\times E_8\) heterotic string theory on orbifolds of \(K3 \times T^2\) by \(g'\) which acts as an \(\mathbb{Z}_N\) automorphism of \(K3\) together with a\(1/N\) shift on a circle of \(T^2\). The orbifold action \(g'\) corresponds to the \(26\) conjugacy classes of the Mathieu group \(M_{24}\). We show that for the standard embedding the new supersymmetric index for these compactifications can always be decomposed into the elliptic genus of \(K3\) twisted by \(g'\). The difference in one-loop corrections to the gauge couplings are captured by automorphic forms obtained by the theta lifts of the elliptic genus of \(K3\) twisted by \(g'\). We work out in detail the case for which \(g'\) belongs to the equivalence class \(2B\). We then investigate all the non-standard embeddings for\(K3\) realized as a \(T^4/\mathbb{Z}_\nu\) orbifold with \(\nu = 2, 4\) and \(g'\) the \(2A\) involution. We show that for non-standard embeddings the new supersymmetric index as well as the difference in one-loop corrections to the gauge couplings are completely characterized by the instanton numbers of the embeddings together with the difference in number of hypermultiplets and vector multiplets in the spectrum.